Camera Man: New Look at Buster Keaton

 

CAMERA MAN (2022)

By Dana Stevens

Atria Books, 393 pages + back matter

★★★ ½ 

 

 

 

Most agree that Charlie Chaplin was early cinema’s king of comedy. Then it’s a tossup between Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. Dana Stevens, a film critic and podcast cohost for Slate, makes a strong case for Keaton. She is an unabashed Keaton fan.

 

As Camera Man’s subtitle suggests—The Dawn of Cinema and the Invention of the Twentieth Century—Stevens has ambitious things in mind that go beyond a blow-by-blow look at Keaton films. Not that the latter is even possible; some of his one-reel films are considered lost. Stevens situates Keaton within deeper connections between popular culture and its historical context, a strategy that sometimes drops Keaton from the limelight and into the background of events that helped define the twentieth century, including social problems, reform movements, vaudeville, World War One, technological change, anti-Antisemitism, racism, the Roaring Twenties, the power of print media, surrealism, and the triumph of big business. In like fashion, Keaton takes his place among others synonymous with the shift from Victorianism to modernism: D. W. Griffith, Mack Sennett, Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst, Ernest Hemingway, Louis B. Mayer, Mary Pickford, Mabel Normand, Irving Thalberg, Bert Williams….

 

Stevens begins her tale in earnest when young Joseph Frank Keaton—dubbed Buster to differentiate him from his father Joe—began performing in vaudeville at the age of three with Joe and his mother, Myra. Theirs was an act that would shock those of delicate sensibilities. Laughs were milked by Joe’s hurling of Buster across the stage with such force that Buster was dubbed “the boy who can’t be damaged.” When alarmists sought to end such endangerment, an outraged Joe Keaton told his detractors, “He’s my son and I’ll break his neck any way I want to.” Eventually, though, things did get out of hand; Joe Keaton descended into alcoholism, Myra briefly left him, and Buster read the tea leaves correctly and realized a new entertainment platform doomed vaudeville: motion pictures.

 

Buster’s movie career took off when he befriended Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. Count Stevens among those who believe Arbuckle was a wronged man when actress Virginia Rappe died at a 1921 party at Arbuckle’s home. Arbuckle was accused of rape and manslaughter and, after three trials, was acquitted though his career lay in tatters. Keaton fared better. The years 1920-28 saw Keaton make silent films that established him a star. Three—Sherlock Jr. (1924), The General (1926), and Steamboat Bill (1928)—are considered silent film masterworks. Stevens argues that Keaton’s move to MGM in 1928 was a misstep and I agree.  Camera Man, the 1928 film that lends its name to the book, is practically unwatchable.

 

Unlike Stevens, I only partly blame MGM. Film fans know that “talkies” took off in 1927. Keaton made several more silent films before shifting to talkies, but Stevens and I part company on Keaton’s post-1928 movie career. Keaton was a brilliant physical comedian who did outrageously funny things far more dangerous than being hurled across the stage—watch him ride backwards in a driverless motorcycle in Sherlock Jr.­ or stand in the door of a house falling down in Steamboat Bill Jr.­—that could have maimed or killed him. He was so nonchalant that he dubbed the “Great Stoneface.” Like many great comics, this sort of comedy had its season. The 1930s would belong to verbal comics and Keaton couldn’t top what he did in the 1920s.

 

Stevens correctly notes that Keaton tried to adapt. He was also a “camera man” because he became a producer and director, but was he funny? Keaton wrote gags for others, but even erstwhile friends such as the Marx Brothers found his shtick shopworn. His film work in the 1950s and 1960s was largely confined to cameo roles, as were his incessant guest turns on television from 1949-65, and as a product pitchman until his death in 1966. This work was extensive, but not artistically brilliant, though Stevens is right to give him credit for again identifying how popular culture was shifting.

 

Keaton’s deeper problem could be labeled “like father, like son.” Stevens details Buster’s own descent into alcoholism and attendant problems, including two failed marriages. I enjoyed this book, especially Stevens’ balance of analysis and snark. I wish, though, that she had more control over her fandom. Like it or not, the 1920s were not only Keaton’s high-water mark; they gave him license to be merely okay for the next 36 years.

 

Rob Weir