![]() ![]() Both halves of this "faked" stunt are dangerous. Even when there is fakery, the result is daring in "Go West" he seems to fall from a high suspension bridge, but actually falls only 50 feet or so before landing in a net there's a cut to another shot showing him falling the last 20 feet. He was one of the most gifted stuntmen in the movies. ![]() The falls are usually not faked: He lands, gets up, keep going. He falls and falls and falls in his movies: From second-story windows, cliffs, trees, trains, motorcycles, balconies. For the rest of his career, Keaton was "the great stone face," with an expression that ranged from the impassive to the slightly quizzical. But when Buster emerged with a solemn expression on his face, for some reason the audience loved it. He claimed that Harry Houdini dubbed him " Buster" because of those falls Houdini was a friend, but the nickname came before the Keatons met him.īuster and Joe discovered that when he was hurled through the bass drum and emerged waving and smiling, the audience didn't see the joke in treating a kid that way. "It was the roughest knockabout act that was ever in the history of the theater," Keaton told the historian Kevin Brownlow. Today this would be child abuse then it was showbiz. By the time he was 3, he was being thrown around the stage and into the orchestra pit, and his little suits even had a handle concealed at the waist, so Joe could sling him like luggage. He said he learned to "take a fall" as a child, when he toured in vaudeville with his parents, Joe and Myra. Instead of using doubles, he himself doubled for some of his actors, doing their stunts as well as his own. We hear about the stunts of Douglas Fairbanks Sr., but no silent star did more dangerous stunts than Buster Keaton. And his movies, seen as a group, are like a sustained act of optimism in the face of adversity surprising how, without asking, he earns our admiration and tenderness.īecause he was funny, because he wore that porkpie hat, Keaton's physical skills are often undervalued. Buster survives tornadoes, waterfalls, avalanches of boulders and falls from great heights, and never pauses to take a bow: He has his eye on his goal. His films avoid the pathos and sentiment of the Chaplin pictures, and usually feature a jaunty young man who sees an objective and goes after it in the face of the most daunting obstacles. I think he cared, but was too proud to ask. It's said that Chaplin wanted you to like him, but Keaton didn't care. Now almost everything has been recovered, restored, and is available on DVDs and tapes that range from watchable to sparkling. ![]() But other features and shorts existed in shabby, incomplete prints, if at all, and it was only in the 1960s that film historians began to assemble and restore Keaton's lifework. "The General," with Buster as a train engineer in the Civil War, was always available, hailed as one of the supreme masterpieces of silent filmmaking. Most of these movies were long thought to be lost. ![]()
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