12 S UNDAY, MARCH 13, 2022
IS THERE PENT-UP DEMANDfor books that
span the life of a deadpan dead man? This
season marks the publication of not one
but two major biographies of Buster
Keaton, the silent-screen comedy titan
who distinguished himself from his fore-
most peers, Charlie Chaplin and Harold
Lloyd, with his squished porkpie hat and
stone face.
That stoic mug stares out intimidatingly
from the cover of James Curtis’s compre-
hensive survey “Buster Keaton: A Film-
maker’s Life.” It was so instantly recogniz-
able in Keaton’s 1920s heyday that Metro
Pictures, one of the studios that financed
the star’s films, marketed him variously as
the “sad-faced comedian,” the “frozen-
faced comedian” and — now here’s an irre-
sistible tag! — the “boy with the funeral ex-
pression.”
Keaton came by this expression natu-
rally, recognizing its comic potential as a
child player in vaudeville. He was born into
show business on Oct. 4, 1895, the son of
Joe and Myra Keaton, an itinerant per-
forming duo who billed themselves as “the
Eccentric Tad and the Chic Soubrette.”
Curtis, who has also written mighty biog-
raphies of Preston Sturges, James Whale,
W.C. Fields and Spencer Tracy, does a de-
lightful job of capturing the old, weird
America in which the Keatons plied their
trade, Joe with his acrobatic pratfalls and
high kicks, and the 4-foot-11 Myra with her
musical accompaniment on piano and sax-
ophone.
At the time of Buster’s birth, the Keatons
were part of a traveling troupe affiliated
with the Umatilla Indian Medicine Com-
pany, which hustled tonics and ersatz folk
remedies to a gullible public. Admission to
these medicine shows was free, but most
attendees ended up splurging on dubious
unguents and cough syrups. It was the
troupe’s compère and chief salesman, a
London-born comedian named George A.
Pardey, who assigned young Joseph Frank
Keaton the name he would carry the rest of
his life. Observing the toddler bouncing
fearlessly down a flight of stairs, Pardey
proclaimed: “Gee whiz! He’s a regular
buster!”
Buster’s capacity for getting knocked
around without complaint proved critical
to his family’s fortunes. By the time he was
5, Keaton and his father had perfected a vi-
olent, Itchy & Scratchy-like routine in
which, bizarrely, they dressed as pan-
tomime Irishmen with matching high fore-
heads, auburn whiskers and tartan get-
ups. (In the business, the senior Keaton’s
act was categorized as a “rough Irish spe-
cialty.”) The irreverent boy disrupted his
father’s stunts, prompting a mock-enraged
Joe to hurl Buster great distances. Cue
roaring audience laughter. Before long, the
act was renamed the Three Keatons and
was a major draw on the vaudeville circuit.
As agile an acrobat as his father, Buster
was proficient at avoiding injury even as
he was flung hither and yon. His propen-
sity for showing as little emotion as possi-
ble during his calamitous encounters with
Dad made the act even funnier. “It’s just
my way of working, I guess,” Keaton said
in an interview quoted in Curtis’s book. “I
have found — especially on the stage —
that when I finish a stunt, I can get a laugh
just by standing still and looking at the au-
dience as if I was surprised and slightly
hurt to think that they would laugh at me.”
This combination of talents proved felic-
itous when Keaton inevitably aged out of
the family act and started making movies.
His greatest works from his golden dec-
ade, the 1920s, combine physical derring-
do, visual gags stacked one atop another
and that face. In his short “One Week,”Keaton and his love interest, played by
Sybil Seely, attempt to build a mail-order-
kit house, only for their dreams to be foiled
by mismatched parts and their own incom-
petence. The movie’s bravura sequence
finds the couple hosting a dinner party
during a storm that sets their home spin-
ning on its foundation, with Buster tossing
centrifugally in and out of the house like a
lettuce leaf in a salad spinner. In his 1924
full-length feature “Sherlock Jr.,” Keaton
speeds through various locales while
crouched upon the handlebars of a motor-
cycle that has lost its driver, surviving a
gantlet that includes heavy city traffic, an
oncoming train and the traversal of a bro-
ken bridge whose gap is filled, just in the
nick of time, by two trucks moving in oppo-
site directions.
Keaton was as much a technical innova-
tor as he was a comic, and Curtis’s book
goes into painstaking detail about how
these effects were achieved. (The spinning
house was built on a turntable whose con-
trol belt was buried in dirt and grass.) Ev-
ery bit as important, “Buster Keaton”
serves as a welcome corrective to the per-
ception that Keaton’s was a tragic life un-
done by drink and the advent of the talkies.
This myth is partly a function of Keaton’s
persuasiveness as an actor in his later
years: grimly staring down his losing hand
as one of the washed-up old-Hollywood
“waxworks” who play cards with Norma
Desmond in Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boule-
vard” (1950) and impassively dancing the
twist with the bikini-clad starlet Bobbi
Shaw in the teensploitation flick “BeachBlanket Bingo” (1965, a year before his
death).
Curtis does not shy away from Keaton’s
rock-bottom 1930s, when he lost his cre-
ative autonomy at MGM, wriggled out of a
loveless marriage to his first wife, Natalie
Talmadge, and drank so heavily that he
was, for a time, unemployable. But the
overall picture he paints is of an even-
keeled showbiz lifer who was simply
happy to keep on working. Unlike many of
his contemporaries, Keaton never looked
down on television, warming early to its
potential to reach millions. He hosted a va-
riety program on a local station in Los An-
geles and starred in clever ads for Alka-
Seltzer; Curtis notes that Keaton thought
of TV commercials “as little comedy shorts
akin to the two-reelers” that he made in his
youth. One Easter Sunday in the 1960s, he
stopped by a party hosted by Mary Pick-
ford and pitied the silent-movie stars in at-
tendance. “I discovered we had nothing to
talk about,” Keaton said. “Some of them
had never heard a Beatles record. They
hadn’t kept up with the times.”
Keaton’s final act was a contented vic-
tory lap in which he lived modestly in the
San Fernando Valley town of Woodland
Hills, happily married to his third wife, El-
eanor Norris, and cognizant of the re-
newed esteem in which his silent films
were held. The lack of operatic highs and
lows in Keaton’s life can make Curtis’s
straight-ahead, sequentially narrated bio a
slog if you’re not a committed Buster Boi,
but it’s as definitive an account of the sad-
faced comedian as one could hope for.
Dana Stevens’s “Camera Man: Buster
Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the In-
vention of the Twentieth Century” is a wel-
come complement, in that Stevens, a mov-
ie critic for Slate, contextualizes Keaton’s
achievements in a way that Curtis does
not. In an elegant preface, Stevens posi-
tions 1895, the year of Keaton’s birth, as a
crucially transitional time, “not yet the
20th century but the still-illegible sign of
what it might become.” Marconi has only
just succeeded at “transmitting radio
waves over a considerable distance.”
Freud is struck by the idea to analyze his
patients by interpreting their dreams. And
in the basement of a Paris cafe, the Lu-
mière brothers screen their moving pic-
tures for a paying audience for the first
time.
Buster emerges in the new century as an
agent of what we would now call disrup-
tion. He, Chaplin and Keaton’s filmmaking
mentor, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, aren’t
just funnymen but entrepreneurs, early
adopters of new technology whose smarts
and foresight earn them tons of money and
admiration. Like the tech bros of today,
they meet a mixed bag of fates. Chaplin is
the most revered but spends his later life in
a gilded prison of his own self-importance
and melancholy. Arbuckle is brought low
by a scandal in which he is charged with
killing a young actress and later exonerat-Falling-Down Funny
How Buster Keaton helped turn slapstick — and film — into an art form.
By DAVID KAMP
BUSTER KEATON
A Filmmaker’s Life
By James Curtis
Illustrated. 810 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $40.
CAMERA MAN
Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema,
and the Invention of the Twentieth Century
By Dana Stevens
Illustrated. 415 pp. Atria Books. $29.99. Buster Keaton
DAVID KAMPis the author of “Sunny Days: The
Children’s Television Revolution That
Changed America.”