Belatedly Celebrating Buster Keaton

Last autumn was the 125th birth anniversary of silent screen genius Buster Keaton. TCM celebrated with a night of his movies, along with a relatively recent documentary, The Great Buster: A Celebration. I hadn't watched it before because I naturally figured it wasn't likely to be on DVD. But when I checked, I found out that it is in fact on DVD. So I sat down to watch it and do a review here.

Directed and narrated by Peter Bogdanovich, the movie is a fairly standard biography, albeit one that has a bunch of talking heads from the world of comedy talking about his movies. Keaton was born to parents traveling with a vaudeville show, so he gut put into performing at a very early age. Little Buster showed great talent for taking the throws that his father did. He became the star of the show, leaving when he was 21 so that he could make enough money to give his two younger siblings the education he didn't get.

In New York, he was going to star on Broadway, but got roped into doing a two-reeler with Fatty Arbuckle. He loved it and knew he wanted to go into the movies, which he did in a big way, eventually writing and directing his own movies because he could figure out how to make the gags work. In the last five years of the silent era, Keaton was extremely successful. But with the introduction of talking pictures, tragedy was to come.

Keaton signed a contract with MGM that stifled his creativity, leading him to drink more, and destroying his first marriage. He sank into obscurity, until his third marriage which lasted about 25 years until the end of his life. Eventually he was rediscovered in the final decade of his life and got to find out just how many movie buffs there were who actually liked his old silent films.

Keaton dies, but this comes only about two-thirds of the way into the movie. So for the last third, we get the 10 or so movies Keaton made during the last five years of the silent era, with Bogdanovich showing us scenes from most of them and telling us why he thinks these scenes are so successful, even if the films as a whole didn't always work.

There's not all that much going on here, so people who are already quite knowledgeable about Keaton may find it all a bit trite, and would prefer to rewatch the movies themselves. But for people who don't know much about silent cinema, I think it would make a pretty darn good introduction to one of the greats, along with starting with the two-reelers like One Week.