Buster Keaton’s Silent Movie, Revisited

A hundred years later, the sequence still radiates an otherworldly aura: a man wearing a porkpie hat walks down the aisle of a movie theater, steps up onto the stage, and slips into the motion picture screen. The film we have been watching — a conventional enough story of a boy who loses his girl due to a dumb misunderstanding — flows fluidly into another cinematic realm, where the boy is a brilliant detective who outwits the bad guys, solves the crime, and gets the girl. One Hollywood fantasy is switched for a more beguiling Hollywood fantasy. 

The film, of course, is Sherlock Jr. (1924), directed by and starring Buster Keaton, the greatest of all silent film comedian-auteurs. (Team Chaplin is welcome to dissent.) It is the usual Keaton concoction of ingenious gags, trick photography and jaw-dropping stunt work, but the film, true to its name, is also an investigation into the role of screen imagery in our imaginative lives, a prescient Jazz Age meditation on a relationship that has only grown more intimate over time, as the screens have moved closer, into our living rooms, into our hands.      

In the trinity of the great silent comedians, Buster Keaton has traveled into our own realm without a trace of mileage. Charles Chaplin’s Victorian sentimentality can be cloying and Harold Lloyd’s exuberant go-getting crashed with the Roaring Twenties, but Keaton’s appeal hasn’t dated — the stoicism, the mechanical dexterity, the target fixation on the task at hand. Among the mute stars from the first chapter of Hollywood’s history, he has attained a status that is not just pantheon but (arguably) preeminent. At the annual silent film festival in Pordenone, Italy, the Mecca for film fans who think it all went terribly wrong in 1927 with The Jazz Singer, the animated montage of silent era stars, shown before each screening, ends with a silhouette of Keaton, his porkpie hat floating in the air and landing on his head.     

Joseph Frank Keaton was born in 1895, in Topeka, Kansas, where his constantly touring vaudevillian parents happened to be visiting relatives. He was drafted into the family business as soon as he learned to walk and do pratfalls. The act was built around what today would be called child abuse: Buster’s father pummeled the boy, tossing him violently around stage and sometimes into the audience. (The oft-told tale of Buster getting his nickname from escape artist Harry Houdini — “That’s some little buster you got there!” he allegedly exclaimed as the toddler landed on his feet after tumbling down the stairs — is, alas, apparently apocryphal.) By early adolescence, Keaton was a showbiz veteran and the star of the act. In 1917, he made the inevitable transition to the new medium, recruited by his good friend and future Hollywood pariah Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.  

Initially in a series of innovative two-reelers, then at feature length, Keaton honed his cinematic chops and shaped his screen persona. Understanding that a full-length narrative could not simply be a fusillade of non-stop gags and picaresque slapstick, he located his comedy-dramas in realistic historical and geographical spaces: the Appalachian hills of the early nineteenth-century (Our Hospitality [1923]), the Civil War (The General [1926]), a seaport on the Pacific ocean (The Navigator [1924]), or a Mississippi riverboat junction (Steamboat Bill, Jr. [1928]). Part acrobat, part ballet artist, he battled against meteorology, the laws of physics, and fate. He never mugged — an early admirer called him “the personification of a mental minus sign in facial expression” — hence “The Great Stone Face” moniker. 

Keaton explained the expressionless-ness that became his trademark by saying he was concentrating on the stunt work, which he choreographed with mathematic precision. He had to: a few inches either way and the authentically near-death experiences would have been fatal. Steamboat Bill, Jr. contains a more terrifying than funny moment in which the front façade of a house falls onto his standing figure. The gag is that his body fits neatly into an empty window frame in the attic, but he might well have been flattened.

Sherlock Jr. was Keaton’s fifth and shortest feature length film. He labored over it for five months, previewing rough cuts to audiences, editing and reediting. In the end, he shot 60,000 feet of film for a picture that runs 4,065 feet or five reels (about 45 minutes: silent films were measured in feet and reels not seconds because of the variable camera and projector speeds). He was assisted by his friend and frequent collaborator Clyde Bruckman, a multi-hyphenate workhorse in silent comedy. Also behind the camera early on was Roscoe Arbuckle, who had been blacklisted by the Hays office after an unjust accusation of manslaughter in 1921 and three sensational trials (he was ultimately acquitted). Keaton wanted to throw a lifeline to his old friend, but Arbuckle proved too emotionally fraught to stay with the project. 

Sherlock Jr. bides its time winding up, lulling the audience before the leap into time and space travel. Buster works as a projectionist in a small movie house. He is making progress with his girl (Kathryn McGuire) until he is framed for stealing her father’s pocket watch. Crestfallen, he falls asleep on the job. As his real self snoozes, an ectoplasmic self in double exposure leaves his body and walks into the film he is projecting. (Not incidentally, one reason Sherlock Jr. is so beloved by silent film buffs is because it offers a vivid glimpse into silent era exhibition practice: the lobby front, the projection booth, the musicians in the pit.)

It takes Buster a while to adjust to the new world: he ping-pongs about in jump cut through a montage of cinematic landscapes — leaping into a lake and landing in a snowbank, etc. — before the film within the film settles into a detective story, the scaffolding for a series of remarkable stunts. The most spectacular is rendered with a no-big-deal attitude: Keaton jumps off the roof of a building, onto the top of a raised railroad smashboard, and rides the beam down to land comfortably in the backseat of a moving car. As usual, Keaton films the stunt in a wide long shot with no cuts, so we know it is Keaton and the danger is un-fake-able. The climactic breakneck chase has Buster astride the handlebars of a motorcycle racing through 1920s Los Angeles, only some of which is backscreen projection. 

With the singular exception of a Variety reviewer (probably a Chaplin fan) who called Sherlock Jr. “about as unfunny as an operating room,” critics and audiences alike were enchanted. After being set up by the mundane first act, the reviewer for the New York Times gasped at “one of the best screen tricks ever incorporated in a comedy.” Watching Buster being “wafted through the projection booth aperture and dissolve[ing] right into the action on the screen,” Michael J. Simmons in Exhibitor’s Trade Review rightly predicted that “folks are going to register enthusiastic plaudits for this interesting theme.” Keaton’s own assessment was typically laconic. “It was all right,” he told silent film historian Kevin Brownlow. “It was a money maker, but it wasn’t one of the big ones.”

As with so many immortals of the silent screen, Keaton was undone by the transition to sound and the attendant industrialization of the business. His croaky voice didn’t help, but the supreme genius of physical comedy and high-risk stunt work was never destined to thrive in the talk-mad early sound era, when the new breed of comedians was wisecrackers not acrobats — the Marx Brothers, Mae West, W.C. Fields. He descended into alcoholism and depression; was in and out of sanitoriums and hospitals. The trade press was sympathetic, euphemizing the breakdowns as “nervous indigestion.” Through it all, he always worked, never gave up — The Man Who Wouldn’t Lie Down is how Tom Dardis described him in his 1979 biography. After 1933, Keaton made nearly 60 films, including two unforgettable appearances: a cameo as one of the card-playing “waxworks” in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. (1950) and as an old vaudevillian performing a haunting pas de deux with Charles Chaplin in Limelight (1952).  

In 1940, after two failed marriages, Keaton married Eleanor Norris, who steadied and saved him. In the postwar era, a new generation discovered his artistry on television variety shows and in commercials (look up his work on Candid Camera on YouTube). The Keaton television appearance most germane to the topic at hand occurred in The Twilight Zone, in an episode entitled “Once Upon a Time” telecast on December 15, 1961. Written by Zone regular Richard Matheson mainly as a way to get Keaton into an episode of The Twilight Zone, the whimsical scenario has Keaton playing a janitor from 1890 teleported by a “time helmet” into 1960; the past is a silent movie with piano score and intertitles, the present is in synch sound. The show is not very funny but Keaton, age 66, is still a trouper: running, bicycling, leaping, doing pratfalls.  The TV gigs — and a payoff from The Buster Keaton Story (1957), a biopic starring Donald O’Connor — put the perennially busted Keaton on firmer financial footing. “He had trouble holding on to a buck,” understated the Hollywood columnist Bob Thomas.

Keaton died in 1966, not too late to miss the rising tide of accolades at repertory houses, film festivals, and the Academy Awards, where he was awarded an Honorary Oscar in 1960. “The greatest of all the clowns in the history of the cinema,” said Orson Welles, “a supreme artist, and I think one of the most beautiful people that was ever photographed.” The Keaton revival has never really abated. In 2022, he was the subject of two excellent biographies, James Curtis’s Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life and Dana Steven’s Cameraman. Jackie Chan and Tom Cruise, needless to say, are admirers. 

None of which has quieted the favorite parlor game of silent film buffs about which guy is the greater artist, the one with the derby or the one with porkpie hat. Americans tend to be in Keaton’s corner. The film critic James Agree — whose landmark 1949 essay in Life magazine, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” helped spark the revival of appreciation of silent screen comedy — wrote that Keaton’s face “ranked almost with Lincoln’s as an early American archetype.” Andrew Sarris compared the images in The General to the portraits in Matthew Brady’s gallery. The debate is memorably reenacted in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003), an ode to cinephilia set around the Cinémathèque Française in Paris in the late 1960s. The Frenchman, of course, argues for the superiority of the celestial “Charlot” while the American prefers the native son.

Hollywood also seems to favor Keaton. His full-screen immersion in Sherlock Jr. has provided a model for whole tributaries of fantasy, SF, and adventure films. Every successive medium seems to have inspired a variation on the Keaton theme of a youngster being vacuumed through a portal into an FX-laden screen realm: television (Pleasantville, 1998), video games (Tron, 1982), computer software (The Matrix, 1999), and too many MCU/DCCU multiverses to count. The most explicit homage is Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), a clever reversal of the Keaton conceit, wherein a character in an escapist 1930s adventure film walks out of the motion picture screen and into the three-dimensional world of Great Depression America. 

Yet none of the descendants has matched the ingenuity of the wrap-up in the original, what Keaton and his colleagues would have called “the topper.” At the end of Sherlock Jr., Buster awakens from his cinematic dreamscape and finds himself back in the projection booth. His girl comes in to the booth — all is forgiven and resolved — and stands before him, demure, waiting for Buster to make his move. He has no idea what to do. Hollywood, already the expert on American courtship rituals, comes to the rescue.  On the other movie screen, a man with more romantic savvy is courting his girl. Buster peers through the window of the projection booth for guidance. The visual alignment is geometrical: a perfect straight line through the window of the projection booth from Buster’s eyeline to the screen. The swain on the screen takes his girl’s hand and kisses it. Buster does likewise. He puts a ring on her finger. So does Buster. Then the screen Romeo kisses his girl. Buster screws up his courage and gives his girl a peck on the lips. As she looks down modestly, Buster looks eagerly to the screen for his next move. The image of the happy lovebirds dissolves to a scene of the couple, now married, and the parents of two babies, bouncing on the husband’s knees.  

Buster scratches his head in bewilderment — how the heck did that happen???