The General

1926, US, directed by Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton

Having seen a variety of lesser versions, this beautifully restored print from Kino Lorber really allows you to appreciate the genius of Keaton's visual construction, particularly in gags like that  involving a moving train, a loaded cannon, and a key corner on the track, further explored by Kristin Thompson with copious stills. There's little for me to add to the many previous commentaries on the film, though I found myself far more aware on this occasion of the political components -- such as the brilliant gag involving Keaton's obliviousness to both advancing armies, and the concomitant commentary on the insanity of the entire tragedy. 

Go West

1925, US, directed by Buster Keaton

Brilliant stuff. Keaton's character is frequently mystified by the vicissitudes of technology but the joke here is he's equally confused when faced with more traditional challenges -- riding a horse, milking a cow, and so forth. The milking scene is one of my favourites in all of Keaton's work, absurd and filled with tiny details, like the repeated attempts to offer the cow a three-legged stool as Keaton's character labours under the misapprehension that the object is for the cow's comfort rather than his own, or the almost casual manner in which he flicks at the unfortunate animal's udder in the hopes that she will supply her milk.

Along the way, of course, he does acquire a certain competence -- he mixes his shaving cream with a few drops of expertly-extracted milk -- and even gets the upper hand over a card sharp, at least for a time. In that, his character surely influenced some famously beleagured cartoon characters like Tom the cat, almost always the loser except for those exquisitely pleasurable moments when he finally gets something to go his way. The long sequence late on when he leads hundreds of cattle through the streets of Los Angeles echoes the bridal stampede of Seven Chances, released earlier the same year, making said maidens even more animalistic in retrospect, and increasing the sense that Keaton's character regarded the women with fear more than anything else.

Even in the midst of the chaos, though, there are calm moments, none more striking than the brief sequence when Keaton stops to watch a young black man demonstrate his dance steps; his audience has disappeared as the cattle race down a nearby street but the man keeps moving, enjoying his own skill and absorbed in the moment before he finally realizes there's a problem. 

Three Ages

1923, US, directed by Buster Keaton

Keaton apparently commented that Three Ages was essentially three two-reel films spliced together, although the repetition of certain scenarios in different contexts -- the prehistoric era, Ancient Rome, the 1920s -- is central to the film's effect. The biggest problem is one of quality control: while all three eras have their share of gags, the modern sequence is by far the most polished, with the most spectacular and memorable stuntwork (the football game, the leaps from tall buildings), and each time the action switches back in time I found myself getting antsy, particularly once the intention to repeat each theme became clear. The jokes in the earlier sequences also seem a good deal more obvious at times, almost lazy by Keaton's meticulous standards at times, although that perhaps marks the transition from shorter work to feature films.

Seven Chances

1925, US, directed by Buster Keaton

Almost like two different films welded together -- the first an often very subtle romantic farce, the second an all-out chase sequence that seeks constantly to top itself -- Seven Chances again showcases the range of Keaton's talent: compare, for instance, the brief early sequence where he completes a marriage proposal by casually throwing a card to a woman seated in a gallery only to have the pieces flutter back down to him, to the epic, occasionally injury-defying, plunge down a steep hill as Keaton is threatened by rolling boulders and furious maids. It's not clear which of these is more terrifying to Keaton: he seems more adept at handling any physical harm. What makes the film more troubling, though, is the vein of race humour that sits very uncomfortably now -- while it's possible to construct some narrative around each of the individual incidents involving a black character as though to absolve Keaton the director, in the aggregate it's hard to see them as anything other than unpleasant even if perhaps only too characteristic of their time. Far more difficult to explain away, though, is the use of blackface by white performers; Keaton seems to have been a particular aficionado of the genre, at least based on his interviews.

Our Hospitality

1923, US, directed by John G. Blystone & Buster Keaton

It's only Keaton's second feature film behind the camera  -- though he shares the credit here -- but Our Hospitality is a fine example of the range of both Keaton's talent and his targets, marrying the expected thrills and comic spills with some fine satire of the mores of the American South. Like many of his films, the film starts relatively slowly only to build to a tremendous climax in terms of both scale and drama, and it would be easy to forget how subtle a performer (and director) Keaton was: watch his hands, for instance, as they reveal his character's inner turmoil, as though they've taken up the emotion often absent from his face. Of course, Keaton doesn't save all of the good stuff for the finale: there's a hilarious sequence early on involving an absurd train journey, which must have caused considerable whiplash for the performers involved (as befits a little boy fascinated by machinery, Shay found this section particularly funny, and he was thrilled by the finale, too).

Steamboat Bill, Jr.

 

1928, US, directed by Charles Reisner


A wonderful slow burn -- in so far as film of less than 60 minutes can be such a thing -- with small-scale gags gradually building into some of the most iconic sequences of Keaton's entire career, with buildings collapsing, a jail floating into the river, and Keaton blown six ways to Sunday by the enormous wind machines stationed offscreen. Most satisfying, though, is the way in which Keaton, and director Charles Reisner, marry the comic's daredevil inventiveness with plotlines that sketch both a familial reunion and a nascent romance (which Buster, in the final shot, is determined to consolidate before anyone has a chance to change their minds).

Keaton finds a remarkable pathos in many of the early gags, with his character clearly a disappointment to the father he hardly knows -- a rough and ready riverboat captain who despairs of his ability to mould any kind of man out of the college-boy raw material that he's presented with. The sequence in which the father tries out hat after hat on his son manages simultaneously to comment on Keaton's own iconic headgear, the tense father-son relationship, and class differences, but Keaton then punctuates everything with a gag that deflates everything that's come before. 

While the gags are models of careful construction, the film has an overall visual polish, too, whether in the use of smooth tracking shots or the careful construction of say, the shot where we see Buster's father look out of his jail cell past the sheriff and to Buster, with absurdly upturned umbrella, outside in the pouring rain. A few minutes earlier, there's an equally impressive sequence where Buster watches his father's imprisonment as his (Buster's) girlfriend hovers in the background, the two actors' movements perfectly coordinated in a dance of miscommunication. 

The Navigator

1924, US, directed by Donald Crisp and Buster Keaton

Made the same year as Sherlock Jr., this doesn't soar quite as high for me -- the astonishing inventiveness is there, as are many of the laughs, but perhaps the fact that it's essentially a film built around a prop, however gigantic, robs it of a certain amount of soul. That quality is, for me, at the heart of Keaton's strongest films, and Wes Anderson captured this aspect of Keaton's work rather well in Moonrise Kingdom, alongside several memorable sight gags.

There's something wonderfully ridiculous, though, about the complex setup that Keaton and Crisp engineer to have Keaton and the girl of his dreams aboard an otherwise empty ship -- nefarious agents of obscure foreign nations, shipping magnates, and a foppish family embarrassment all factor into the mix -- but once on board some of the sequences have a brilliance that doesn't always transcend the mechanical, at least from my perspective (the scenes in which Keaton and co-star Kathryn McGuire run up and down the various gangways and passages are amusing but a little over-extended for my taste). By contrast, the sequences in which Buster is convinced that there's another man aboard -- a cutout of director Donald Crisp that floats past his window -- as well as the later scenes on a tropical island, Buster emerging from the sea dressed in a deep sea diver's outfit, restore the sense of absurd invention.

Sherlock Jr.

1924, US, directed by Buster Keaton

I'm not even going to attempt to dissect Keaton's wonderful comedy, which provided easily the most laugh-filled evening I've enjoyed at the cinema this year, except to note that after only a few minutes I started thinking about how much I was looking forward to screening this for my son, still only 18 months old and thankfully as yet pretty uninterested in the television (except in so far as the remote control can be used as an improvised telephone). I loved Chaplin and Keaton when I was young, and Sherlock Jr reinforced my sense that it's been far, far too long since I spent time in their excellent company. I'm not sure if I'd ever seen this particular Keaton before, but the imaginativeness of the gags, both small-scale and death-defying, is often breathtaking; you're still recovering from the previous gag, or the previous portion of a multi-layered gag, when the next laugh is upon you.