Buster Keaton: The Shorts Collection (1917-1923)
s new generations discover the magic of silent cinema, Buster Keaton has emerged as one of the era's most admired and respected artists. Behind the deadpan expression and trademark porkpie hat was a filmmaking genius who conceived and engineered some of the most breathtaking stunts and feats of visual trickery, while never losing sight of slapstick cinema's primary objective: laughter. These 2k restorations were performed utilizing archival film elements from around the world, and promises to be the definitive representation of Keaton's early career. Watching these films in succession, one witnesses the evolution of an artist -- from broad knockabout comedian into a filmmaker of remarkable visual sophistication.
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Buster Keaton: The Shorts Collection -The Balloonatic
The Balloonatic begins in an amusement park and reaches its heights when Buster wanders to where a hot-air balloon is to be launched. The balloon breaks free, with the intended passenger firmly on the ground and Buster onboard. The Balloonatic is also notable for the satisfying interplay between Buster and actress Phyllis Haver. Haver's interesting and well-developed characterization as a love interest is wholly successful and uncommon in the Keaton short comedies.
Buster Keaton: The Shorts Collection - The Scarecrow
An early comedy that addressed the public's fascination with automation (the result of the Ford Motor Company's assembly line), The Scarecrow delights with its clever sequence involving Buster and Joe Roberts as farmhands who share a one-room house with surprising time and space-saving devices. The appearance of "Luke," Arbuckle's Staffordshire Bull Terrier, is a link to Keaton's film apprenticeship.
Buster Keaton: The Shorts Collection - The Play House
The Play House-one of Keaton's greatest comedies-contains one of his best set pieces: a dream sequence in a theater where he plays every member of the cast, crew, pit band, and audience. The multiple exposures on the single strip of film was achieved by cinematographer Elgin Lessley blocking out the full frame with the exception of the small space occupied by one of the various Keaton characters. Lessley then had to rewind the exposed film to the beginning, and repeat the process. As Keaton later remembered, "If he [Lessley] were off the slightest fraction, no matter how carefully I timed my movements, the composite action could not have synchronized. But Elgin was outstanding among all the studio cameramen. He was a human metronome."
Buster Keaton: The Shorts Collection - The Paleface
The Paleface is Keaton's comic exploration of the Western dramas that were popular in American cinema at the time. A group of oil prospectors is swindling a group of Native Americans out of their own lands. The Indian chief proclaims to his tribe: "Kill the first white man who comes through the gate." Naturally, Buster-with butterfly net in hand-is the first white man to blissfully trespass on the Indian property. The film's grand outdoor settings, combined with gags fraught with danger, anticipate Our Hospitality and The General.
Buster Keaton: The Shorts Collection - The Love Nest
The film begins with Buster as a spurned lover who sails alone on his little boat Cupid but is picked up by the large whaling ship The Love Nest. The Love Nest has the distinction of being the only film in the series of nineteen in which Keaton took sole writing and directing credit. James Agee, in his essay "Comedy's Greatest Era," writes, "[Keaton] was the only major comedian who kept sentiment almost entirely out of his work, and he brought pure physical comedy to its greatest heights.
Buster Keaton: The Shorts Collection - The Haunted House
Buster, on the run, hides in an abandoned house where a visiting opera company of Faust also seeks refuge. The film's great moment is a dream sequence in which Buster dreams he is an angel ascending to Heaven. At Saint Peter's Gate he is rejected, and slides down a chute to Hell where he discovers he has been expected.
Buster Keaton: The Shorts Collection - The Goat
Filled with complex and inventive gags, The Goat is one of Keaton's finest comedies. Buster is mistaken for the escaped criminal "Dead Shot Dan" and is on the run. One of the film's great moments has Buster, on the run in a park, hiding under the tarpaulin covering a sculptor's full-size model of a statue that is about to be unveiled. When the statue is revealed in a public ceremony, Buster is seen posing on the back of a clay horse in a comic moment that parallels Chaplin's opening to City Lights (1931 ). The horse gradually sags at the knees under Buster's weight, but Buster continues to hold the pose.
Buster Keaton: The Shorts Collection - The Frozen North
A parody of Western melodramas and their famous star, William S. Hart, The Frozen North was filmed partly on location near Truckee, California and the intertitles drew from Robert W. Service's "The Shooting of Dan McGrew." (Chaplin later used Truckee for The Gold Rush and also drew on "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" for his mock-serious narration to the 1942 re-issue version of his masterpiece). In addition to the parody of Hart, Keaton also does a wicked imitation of film director Erich von Stroheim. Unfortunately, there is only one source copy of this film (from the Czech Republic Film Archive), that does not survive complete.
Buster Keaton: The Shorts Collection - The Electric House
Keaton's love of mechanical gags is beautifully showcased in The Electric House. The scenario involves Buster receiving the wrong diploma at his college commencement, then being mistaken for an electrical engineer by the college dean who commissions him to modernize his home with electrical conveniences. Keaton recreated the little dinner-table railway seen in the film for the picnic table at his final home in Woodland Hills, California, thirty-five years later.
Buster Keaton: The Shorts Collection - The Boat
The Boat, conceived as a companion piece to One Week, finds Buster building a thirty-five-foot family cruiser. It was Keaton's most commercially successful silent two-reel comedy and ranks among his best works. The classic sequence of the boat launch has Buster-the proud owner and captain-, standing at the nose of the boat while his homemade craft slides down into the water and never stops.
Buster Keaton: The Shorts Collection - The Blacksmith
The Blacksmith, involving Buster as an assistant smithy, has long been considered a lesser work for it has been seen in a copy deriving from one owned by Keaton that was, in actual fact, an early preview print.
Buster Keaton: The Shorts Collection - One Week
Keaton's first masterpiece, ONE WEEK, enjoys a joke title lost on most twenty-first century viewers unaware of Elinor Glyn's notorious 1907 novel Three Weeks. The real point of the title is Keaton's brilliant storytelling where each of the seven sequences is introduced with a daily calendar page. The actual inspiration of One Week was Home Made (1919), an educational documentary about portable housing produced by the Ford Motor Company.
Buster Keaton: The Shorts Collection - Neighbors
Neighbors begins with the title, "The Flower of love could find no more romantic spot in which to blossom than in this poet's Dream Garden." This fades into a backyard in a slum with Buster and his sweetheart as a 1921 version of Romeo and Juliet. Neighbors is notable for its acrobatic climax involving "The Flying Escalantes" as well as the appearance of Joe Keaton portraying-naturally-Buster's father.
Buster Keaton: The Shorts Collection - My Wife's Relations
Keaton had married Natalie Talmadge on May 31,1921. His matriarchal in-laws become the fodder for this minor comedy. The sequence Keaton enjoyed best in My Wife's Relations is the family dinner: Buster is not quick enough to get anything but empty serving plates until he changes the calendar to Friday, providing him his only opportunity to enjoy a steak from the devout Irish Catholic family. Keaton reworked this same material for his Educational Pictures comedy Palooka from Paducah (1935), with his own father, mother, and sister among the cast.
Buster Keaton: The Shorts Collection - Hard Luck
In Hard Luck, Buster loses his job and his girl. Down on his luck, he attempts suicide, but all his inept efforts to do away with himself end in failure. The second part of the film finds Buster hired by a local zoo to capture the one animal they do not have: an armadillo. Admittedly a lesser work, Hard Luck was nonetheless Keaton's favorite of all his short comedies because it contained the greatest single laugh of his career.
Buster Keaton: The Shorts Collection - Day Dreams
Day Dreams has as its structure a series of comparisons between the daydreams of how Buster's sweetheart (played by Renee Adoree, later a prominent film star) interprets Buster's letters to her versus the reality of his efforts to make good. Roscoe Arbuckle is believed to have directed some of this comedy. The film went into production as Arbuckle's third manslaughter trial ended and shortly after he had been banned from the screen. James Agee writes, "Much of the charm and edge of Keaton's comedy, however, lay in the subtle leverages of expression he could work against his nominal dead pan. Trapped in the side-wheel of a ferryboat, saving himself from drowning only by walking, then desperately running, inside the accelerating wheel like a squirrel in a cage, his only real concern was, obviously, to keep his hat on.
Buster Keaton: The Shorts Collection - Cops
One of Keaton's greatest and most famous comedies is universally enjoyed for the inventive comedy and amazing chase sequence. However, its darker aspects (Keaton's use of an anarchist's bomb raised painful reminders of the horse and wagon-similar to the one Buster drives-that carried a bomb into New York City's Wall Street business district, killing forty people just the previous year) and fatalistic bent ("The End" title is a tombstone) fascinate film historians and Keaton biographers.
Buster Keaton: The Shorts Collection - Convict 13
Keaton's second release begins with Buster on the golf links where his ineptitude renders him unconscious. The second part of the film involves his dream of being mistaken for escaped convict No. 13 and sent to prison. Convict 13 pushed boundaries with the darkness of its comedy, particularly the scene in which Buster is about to be hanged in prison while his fellow inmates sit as spectators cheering on the proceedings and concessions are sold as if it were a baseball game. In the climax of Convict 13, Keaton swings a ball and chain to stop a prison riot, knocking the inmates unconscious. The first convict hit in the film is his father, Joe Keaton.