THE GREAT BUSTER B-
aka: The Great
Buster: A Celebration
USA (102 mi) 2018
d: Peter Bogdanovich
Keaton’s face ranked
almost with Lincoln’s as an early American archetype; it was haunting,
handsome, almost beautiful, yet it was also irreducibly funny.
―James Agee, novelist, poet, screenwriter and film critic
from his 1949 essay, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,”
First of all, any movie showing a series of clips of Buster
Keaton is a positive delight.
Period. But a director of
Bogdanovich’s stature, known as a film historian, is capable of greater things
than he provides here, as there’s very little analysis of his films, few, if
any film experts or historians, and little insight into his directing
style. While the clips are a delight,
the film skimps on his personal life and family, and it felt odd to visit his
greatest films “after” a look at his earlier career of film shorts, then
skipping to television and even his death, which comes about an hour into the
film, leaving the final section to revisit his greatest feature-length movies
shot in the 20’s, having already shown many of these clips earlier, so it feels
anti-climactic. Bogdanovich claimed he
didn’t want to leave audiences on a sad note with his death, and instead wanted
to “Always leave ‘em laughing,” ending with 10 films Keaton made in five years
up to 1928, but it still feels like a strange and curious edit. Perhaps his greatest sin is claiming SEVEN
CHANCES (1925) was not among Keaton’s greatest films, when it may be his
funniest and the one viewed most often purely for pleasure, as it’s simply a
hilarious experience every single time, where it’s hard to fathom why it
doesn’t get the love from Bogdanovich.
Instead of historians we get comedians, as Johnny Knoxville discusses
his riskiest stunts, Quentin Tarantino describes how he revolutionized the
action sequence, Mel Brooks emphasizes how ingenious it was to violate the
fourth wall to enhance the gag, Carl Reiner gushes “His non-expressive face
expressed so much,” and Richard Lewis claims, somewhat questionably, that many
of Buster’s gags had never been done before (perhaps what he meant to say was
that, like Mozart, they had never been done better, as Keaton simply perfected
them), while also throwing in comments from the likes of Dick Van Dyke (who
knew Keaton), Bill Hader, Paul Dooley, Bill Irwin, not to mention Cybill
Shepherd, Norman Lloyd, and Werner Herzog in that austere voice of gravity
claiming Keaton “was the essence of cinema.”
He also adds questionable television voices like TMC’s Ben Mankiewicz
and Entertainment Tonight’s own
Leonard Maltin, where it’s hard to say this is an improvement over BUSTER
KEATON: A HARD ACT TO FOLLOW (1987), an American Masters 3-part series written
by British film historian Kevin Brownlow and produced by David Gill, a team
that also produced a similar series on Chaplin, D.W. Griffith and Harold Lloyd,
but the clips used in those earlier works are not restored and digitally
enhanced as they are here, as that is the real revelation, though too many
sequences are cut short and not allowed to run to completion, feeling more like
shortly cropped sound bites.
If truth be told, what Bogdanovich is attempting to do here
is introduce Keaton to a new modern generation raised on the Internet that
loathes silent films, that simply has no interest in those old black and white
classics, as it represents “the old days,” going backwards in time. That might explain the talking head jabbering
on about how the latest SPIDER-MAN movie was conceived with Keaton in mind,
which feels extraneous. Young people
prefer to look ahead and not behind, so Bogdanovich grabs them with a stream of
infamous Keaton clips right off the bat as a lure to take the bait and see what
else lies within. Doing his own
narration, with brief biographical details provided by film historian James
Curtis, Bogdanovich tells us Keaton was born into a vaudeville show business
family, performing with his parents onstage by the age of four where Little
Buster became a childhood star with the 3 Keatons as a “human projectile” who
was continuously thrown around the stage, where they actually put a little
handle on his back to make it easier.
His father was actually accused of child abuse in several states, but
apparently was never charged. The
miracle is that in more than 10,000 childhood performances, he was only
slightly injured twice, suggesting that’s where he developed his remarkable
physical agility. Serving in France
during WWI, Keaton suffered hearing loss by being too close to artillery fire,
which apparently affected him his entire lifetime, returning to Hollywood where
he teamed up with comedian Fatty Arbuckle, who taught him the tricks of the
trade, also schooling him on the various uses of the camera, making a series of
shorts together, becoming so successful that Keaton formed his own company, BK
Studios, turning out 19 two-reelers between 1920 and 1923, with as many as
seven completed in a single year. Keaton
married into Hollywood royalty in 1923 when he married Natalie Talmadge,
sister-in-law of his boss, studio executive Joseph Schenck (who went on to form
Twentieth Century Pictures, and actually played a key role in later launching
the career of Marilyn Monroe), who costarred with him in OUR HOSPITALITY
(1923). Then skipping his greatest works
of the 20’s when he had total independence to make what he wanted, the film jumps
ahead to the introduction of talking pictures, where his family connection
caused Keaton to make what he called “the biggest mistake of my life,” signing
with MGM, Hollywood’s biggest studio, where according to Bogdanovich, all the
big comedians did their worst work there, as they were not allowed to utilize
their own comic gifts and spontaneously develop their own gags, but were forced
to work on schedule and conform to the studio system style of shooting, which
was a disaster, pairing Keaton with Jimmy Durante, for instance, having little
in common as their timing was completely off, where he was eventually divorced
and released by the studio, becoming a serious alcoholic.
Perhaps what’s most surprising is the full extent of his
demise, much of which is not well known, where he was briefly institutionalized
in a mental asylum and placed in a strait jacket, but able to escape from
tricks he learned from Harry Houdini, and got remarried in an alcoholic haze,
but completely blacked out any memory of it ever happening before finally marrying
his third wife Eleanor Norris in 1940, which eventually saved him, getting
sober for good. He was an enthusiastic
bridge card-playing aficionado, seen playing with silent stars Anna Q. Nilsson,
HB Warner, and Gloria Swanson. We see
Keaton making a cameo appearance in Billy Wilder’s SUNSET BLVD. (1950),
featured in a small part in Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT (1952), with both
simultaneously silent onstage, the only time they ever worked together, but then
became a hit onstage in Paris, leading to his own half-hour TV show in the mid
50’s, making dozens of 1950’s television ads, but was so pressed for cash that
he appeared in Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello teen flicks like HOW TO
STUFF A WILD BIKINI (1965) and BEACH BLANKET BINGO (1965). Perhaps most obscure, he played a leading
role in a 20-minute silent film entitled FILM (1965) written and directed by
Samuel Beckett that barely gets a mention, though a follow-up documentary by
Ross Lipman entitled NOTFILM (2016) spends more than two hours examining the film. Keaton even appeared in a stunt on Candid Camera, but most moving is the
10-minute standing ovation he receives for a lifetime achievement tribute at
the 1965 Venice Film Festival, which visibly has a profound effect on him,
sadly dying the next year at the age of 70 in 1966. But Bogdanovich saves his greatest films for
the end, mostly allowing the clips to speak for themselves as he features ten
films that are the bedrock of his greatest success, from THREE AGES (1923) to
STEAMBOAT BILL, JR. (1928), once more bringing to life the incomparable comic
genius of “the great stone face,” with Bogdanovich claiming “That kind of
physical comedy will never be unfunny.”
Of interest, the film features some commentary from Patricia Eliot
Tobias, president of Damfinos (Damfinos),
the Buster Keaton Society, who have been honoring Keaton since 1992, including
among their early members Eleanor Keaton, Kevin Brownlow, and Leonard Maltin,
offering her view, “He was ahead of his time, and we’re just now catching up
with him. Buster often played what I
call a stranger in a strange land. He’s
looking at this really weird, absurd world we live in and is confused by it,”
basically challenging us to see the comic potential in the everyday ordinary
and mundane. She singles out SHERLOCK
JR. (1924), where Keaton plays a projectionist who dreams himself into the
movie he’s screening, noting, “I think the reason Sherlock Jr. has gotten more popular is that we’re living in an age
where we interact with media constantly.
We look to media — email, GPS, dating websites, etc. — for the
answers. Here is Buster interacting with
the media of his day.” While the film
often fails to explore the complexity of the man at its center, the clips themselves
are priceless, offering pure unadulterated joy, but the film pales in
comparison to Bertrand Tavernier’s Journey
Through French Cinema (Voyage à travers le cinéma français) (2016), for
instance, which is a more exhaustive and intellectually curious approach to
examining classic French cinema, filled with clips, but also a more astute
analysis.
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