68 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022
off the wagon and then sobering up again.
His brother-in-law, the cartoonist Walt
Kelly, recalls that “nobody really wanted
to put him under control because he was
a lot of fun.” What we perhaps miss, in
accounts of the boozers of yore, is an ad-
equate sense of how much fun they all
thought they were having. Drunks of
that period could not be shaken from
the conviction that they were having a
good time until they were hauled off to
the hospital.
A
s Curtis establishes, when Keaton
did dry out, by the nineteen-fifties,
he had much better later years than the
public image suggests. That image per-
sists; a recent, impassioned French doc-
umentary titled “Buster Keaton: The Ge-
nius Destroyed by Hollywood” maintains
that “in just a few years he went from
being a worldwide star to a washed-up
artist with no future.” Curtis makes it
clear that this assertion is wildly exag-
gerated. Keaton did as well as could have
been hoped. But the notion that sound
killed off the silent comedians is one of
those ideas which, seeming too simple
to be true, are simply true. Chaplin en-
dured because he had money and inde-
pendence, but even he made only two
more comedies in the thirties; Harry
Langdon was ruined and Harold Lloyd
kept his money and withdrew.
Keaton did have to undergo a certain
amount of whatever-happened-to hu-
miliation; he is one of Gloria Swanson’s
bridge party of silent has-beens in “Sun-
set Boulevard.” In tribute after tribute, he
was condescendingly associated with cus-
tard-pie-throwing comedies of a kind he
had almost never made. But he was prop-
erly valued in France, had successful sea-
sons at the Medrano Circus, and worked
ceaselessly as a gag man, even inventing
an entire routine for Lucille Ball that be-
came part of the pilot for “I Love Lucy.”
His most famous late appearance was
alongside Chaplin in “Limelight” (1952),
Chaplin’s last interesting movie, in which
they play two down-on-their-luck vaude-
villians. Claire Bloom, who played the
ingénue, recalls that, in twenty-one days
of shooting, Keaton spoke to her exactly
once, when showing her a tourist-type
photograph of a beautiful Beverly Hills
house. He told her that it had once been
his home, then fell silent. This seems sad,
but Curtis also evokes him watching the
camerawork and helping direct Chap-
lin: “It’s okay, Charlie. You’re right in the
center of the shot. Yeah, you’re fine, Char-
lie. It’s perfect.” Even when he was too
frail to run or move much, as in the 1966
film “A Funny Thing Happened on the
Way to the Forum,” made a year before
his death, and directed by his idolater
Richard Lester, his face was a beacon
not merely of endurance but of a kind
of lost American integrity, the integrity
of the engineer and the artisan and the
old-style vaudeville performer.T
wo kinds of American comedy made
themselves felt in the first half of
the twentieth century: the comedy of in-
vasion and the comedy of resistance. The
first was the immigrant comedy of energy,
enterprise, mischief, and mayhem. The
Marx Brothers are supreme here, but
Chaplin, who, although an immigrant
of the Cockney rather than the Cossacks-
f leeing variety, could play the Jewish
arrival brilliantly, and the immigrant-
comedy vein runs right up to Phil Sil-
vers’s Sergeant Bilko, swindling the
simpleton officers at the Army base. In
response comes the comedy of old-Amer-
ican resistance to all that explosive en-
ergy, struggling to hold on to order and
decency and gallantry. It’s exemplified
by W. C. Fields’s efforts to sleep on his
sleeping porch in “It’s a Gift,” while the
neighborhood around him refuses to
quiet down. The division extends even
to the written humor of the period, with
S. J. Perelman the cynical navigator and
commercial participant in the endless
ocean of American vulgarity, and James
Thurber wistfully watching from Man-
hattan as the old values of the republic
pass away in Columbus.
Keaton is the stoical hero of the com-
edy of resistance, the uncomplaining man
of character who sees the world of order
dissolving around him and endures it as
best he can. (In “Steamboat Bill, Jr.,” it’s
the nostalgic world of the river steam-
boat; in “The General,” it is, for good or
ill, the Old South.) Keaton’s characters
have character. They never do anything
remotely conniving. And the one thing
Keaton never does is mug. There are mo-
ments in all his best features, in fact, that
anticipate the kind of Method acting
that didn’t come into fashion for another
generation, as when he impassively slips
to the ground beside the girl in thebeginning of “The Cameraman,” regis-
tering the act of falling in love by the ti-
niest of increments. The best thing in
“Steamboat Bill, Jr.” might be a bit of
acting so subtle that one wonders whether
people got it at the time. Under suspicion
of sexual instability—“If you say what
you’re thinking I’ll strangle you!” the title
card has the captain saying bluntly to a
friend, after watching his son caper with
his ukulele—Bill, Jr., is compelled by his
father to throw away his Frenchified beret,
and try on a sequence of American hats.
Keaton doesn’t attempt, as Chaplin might
have, to adopt a distinct persona in each
hat but actually does what we do in front
of a clothing-store mirror: he wears his
trying-on face, testing a daring expres-
sion, sampling the aesthetic effect of each
hat for the sake of his vanity while try-
ing not to offend his father by seeming
too much the hat aesthete. Somehow he
is both preening and hiding. It’s an amaz-
ing moment of pure performance, and
every bit as “cinematic”—showing what
extreme closeups can do—as the big
special-effects sequences.
“Though there is a hurricane eter-
nally raging about him, and though he
is often fully caught up in it, Keaton’s
constant drift is toward the quiet at the
hurricane’s eye,” the critic Walter Kerr
observed of Keaton. What remains most
in one’s memory after an immersion in
Keaton are the quiet, uncanny shots of
him in seclusion, his sensitive face reg-
istering his own inwardness. In this way,
maybe there is some relevance in a Kea-
ton revival today. Critics may invent their
causes, but sometimes a good critical
book, or two, can create a cause that
counts. Chaplin is a theatrical master
and needs a theatre to make his mark.
His movies play much, much better with
an audience present. Keaton can be a
solitary entertainment, seen with as much
delight on a computer screen as in a movie
palace—rather as our taste for the great
humanist sacrament of the symphony
depends in some part on having open
concert halls, while chamber music has
whispered right throughout the pan-
demic. Keaton is the chamber-music
master of comedy, with the counterpoint
clear and unmuddied by extraneous emo-
tion. It may be that our new claustro-
phobia is mirrored in his old comedy.
The hospital has blown away, and that
house has fallen on us all.