Best of buster keaton movies cracked#

Then we figure out what comes next.” He buddied up easily. Carrying the entire film around in his head allowed him to improvise on the spot, using what he called “the huddle system”: “We all get our heads together like a bunch of college-boys taking football signals. Keaton “lived in the camera,” said Arbuckle.

Casually striking a match from a passing train in Out West (1918), Arbuckle also strikes a note of pure cinema. In his 1949 essay “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” James Agee wrote that “Keaton’s face ranked almost with Lincoln’s as an early American archetype, haunting, handsome, almost beautiful, yet it was also irreducibly funny.” At the age of 21, after 16 years of kicks, jumps, tumbles and falls, he broke up the act and teamed up with actor and comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, with whom he honed the art of the sight gag to the point of balletic abstraction. “If something tickled me and I started to grin, the old man would hiss ‘Face, Face!’ That meant freeze the puss.” THEATER KID Keaton with his parents in 1900, when they were touring the country as a popular vaudeville act

Best of buster keaton movies cracked#

When he cracked a smile, the audience didn’t laugh as hard. As Kenneth Tynan noted, Keaton’s philosophy was that of the stoic: you fall hard, you get right back up. They spent half their time dodging the officers of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in order to deter their investigations Joe once took Buster to the New York City mayor and asked him to strip bare in front of him to show he had no bruises, but he had long since learned to avoid taking the fall on the back of his head, base of his spine, elbows, or knees. By today’s standards, it borders on child abuse. “When I smelled whiskey across the stage I got braced,” Keaton said. Billed as “The Little Boy Who Can’t Be Damaged,” he had a suitcase handle fitted onto the back of his costume so that his father, Joe, could hurl him across the stage like a human bowling ball, sometimes as far as 30 feet. “I was just a harebrained kid that was raised backstage,” said Keaton, who as a child was part of a vaudeville act with his parents.

Photo by John Springer Collection/Corbis, via Getty Images WHY SO SERIOUS? Keaton (circa 1920) did all his own stunts in a nearly fifty-year career of physical comedy

When Indiana Jones is punched through his windscreen in Raiders of the Lost Ark, disappears under the wheels of his own truck, attaches his whip to its undercarriage, and hauls himself back on board to resume his fight with a Nazi, the beautiful, Rube Goldberg–ish circularity of the gag echoes the climax in Spite Marriage (1929), in which Keaton is thrown from the bow of a yacht, gets dragged under by the current, clambers aboard a small yawl being dragged from the stern by a rope, hauls himself in, and rejoins the fight. “The best way to get a laugh is to create a genuine thrill and then relieve the tension with comedy,” said Keaton, whose films are the original recipe for the action-plus-comedy formula of today’s billion-dollar franchise industry. Welterweight champion Mickey Walker called Keaton’s climactic fight scene in Battling Butler (1926) “the greatest battle I ever saw outside of the ring.” In College (1927), Keaton pelts his adversary with whatever he has at hand - cups, dishes, books, a bust - just like Matt Damon’s Bourne. “We knew from bitter experience in the old days that stuntmen don’t get you laughs,” said the comedian, who emerges from the pages of Curtis’s Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life not just as the first indie auteur but as the direct forerunner of Indiana Jones and Jason Bourne: the first action hero. He treated it with whiskey until a few days later, when an X-ray revealed he had broken his neck - just one on a long list of shattered bones, fractures, and concussions sustained in the course of a nearly 50-year career, as recounted in James Curtis’s authoritative new biography of the filmmaker. After falling from a waterspout, onto which he had clambered from a moving train while filming his 1924 silent comedy Sherlock Jr.