This Day in Film History (Buster Keaton, Silent Film Innovator, Born)

Oct. 4, 1895— The son of vaudevillians, Joseph Frank Keaton was born on a barnstorming tour in Piqua, KS—but he would become better known to audiences as Buster Keaton, part of the “Great Triumvirate” of the most popular silent film comedians, along with Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd.

At six months old, the child survived falling down a flight of stairs. A visiting family friend, Harry Houdini, picking him up, said the youngster could really take a “buster,” or fall, giving rise to his nickname. At three months old, the boy was incorporated into his parents’ vaudeville act.

If his father Joe gave Buster an early boost in the entertainment industry, he also foreshadowed his own fate. The elder Keaton fell victim to alcoholism, breaking up his family and his act, falling on hard times until the love of another woman years later led him to curb his drinking at last—all circumstances repeated in the case of his son.

But at the height of his popularity in the 1920s, “The Great Stone Face” (a nickname given for his cinematic impassivity in the face of staggering disaster) set standards for comedy that influenced filmmakers for generations.

In a series of shorts from 1917 to 1920, Keaton learned the tricks of the trade from another ex-vaudevillian, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. Several years later, when Hollywood shunned the roly-poly comic after a sensational sex scandal and three manslaughter trials in which he was eventually cleared of all charges but still found his name blackened, Keaton showed his loyalty by giving him financial assistance, securing directing work for him, and even testifying publicly on his behalf.

Keaton’s reputation rests on nearly 20 shorts and 11 silent features in which he wrote, directed and starred in the 1920s that made use of his of the acrobatics he learned in vaudeville. Several not only still leave modern audiences shaking with laughter but industry professionals shaking their heads that Keaton could even pull off such hair-raising stunts on his own so early in the life of Hollywood.

The Steamboat Bill Jr. sequence, for instance, when a house collapses around him and he miraculously escapes unscathed, could no longer be filmed as is because of insurance-company considerations, according to Gary Giddins’ “Speechless” essay on Keaton and Chaplin in the critic’s 2006 collection, Natural Selection. 

Stunt men are still flabbergasted that he could be pulled onto a speeding train with just one outstretched arm in the short Cops. And Keaton did not realize until a doctor visit years afterward that he had broken his neck while filming a railroad water-tank scene in Sherlock Jr.

Many of his gags resulted from his fascination with mechanics and his careful discussion with associates on how to use this to pull off a sequence. In the 1921 two-reeler, The Boat, he finally figured out how to film the launch of the ship from a pier. (The boat name in this film gave rise to the identification used by members of The International Buster Keaton Society: the Damfinos.

This fascination with mechanics may have reached a height in Sherlock Jr., where his projectionist character falls asleep, dreams that film’s villain and love interest are his rival and girlfriend, and leaps into the theater screen to set matters right. (Woody Allen would use the same idea in his 1985 comedy, The Purple Rose of Cairo.) And, in The General, the climactic train crash cost the equivalent of more than half a million dollars in today’s terms, in what is believed to be the most expensive scene in silent film history.

No account of Keaton’s persona can fail to mention two other items: his pork pie hat and still, unsmiling face.

The actor, feeling he needed a different kind of hat to distinguish himself from other screen comics, decided to fashion the pork pie by cutting a Stetson, stiffening the brim with sugar water, adding granulated sugar in a teacup of warm water, then wetting the top and bottom of the brim before letting it dry until it became stiff. He would have to make multiple such hats for each picture, as he did more water stunts than most comics of the time.

As for the face: he would later claim that he was so caught up in the details of making a movie that he didn’t realize he wasn’t smiling. But it turned out to be an ideal counterpoint to the manic motion of his stunts. As critic James Agee explained:

“He used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things; a one-track mind near the track's end of pure insanity; mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances; how dead a human being can get and still be alive; an awe-inspiring sort of patients and power to endure, proper to granite but uncanny in flesh and blood. Everything that he was and did bore out this rigid face and played laughs against it. When he moved his eyes, it was like seeing them move in a statue.”

The prospect of talkies did not faze Keaton in the least, because his voice had been trained in vaudeville. But he was tripped up from an unexpected quarter: his brother-in-law, Joseph Schenck.

Schenck, who had handled the business end of operations while Keaton handled the creative details, persuaded him, following the box-office failures of Steamboat Bill Jr. and The General, that he should give up his own studio and join MGM. The new arrangement proved a straitjacket for Keaton, as the studio sharply curtailed his practice of performing his own stunts and required prior script approval from an artist who depended heavily on improvisation. 

At the same time, the collapse of his marriage led wife Natalie Talmadge to initiate bitter divorce proceedings—and Keaton to drink heavily, lose his contract with MGM and suffer a nervous breakdown.

On the rebound, Keaton married his nurse—but that relationship fell apart, too, in a few years. It was not until 1940, when Keaton wed his third wife, dancer Eleanor Norris, that he achieved emotional stability, and not until the end of the decade—a full generation after his emotional and creative downward spiral began—that he came back into the public’s consciousness, through three major events:

*Agee’s seminal 1949 Life Magazine essay, “Comedy's Greatest Era,” spotlighted Keaton and fellow silent comics Chaplin and Lloyd;

*Sunset Boulevard (1950) included Keaton among bridge players who meet at the home of fellow silent-film star, the fictional Norma Desmond (played by the real-life Gloria Swanson);

*Limelight (1952) teamed Keaton for the first and only time with Chaplin.

From the 1950s through the mid-1960s, Keaton worked constantly, mostly in television, with the occasional film supporting appearance (e.g., Beach Blanket Bingo, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum). By his death in 1966, he had gained a new generation of admirers, a cadre that, over the years, has included Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich, Mel Brooks, Richard Lewis, Bill Hader, and Dick Van Dyke (another physical comedian, who gave the eulogy at the funeral for his friend).

Appreciation of this multi-talented innovator only grows. Earlier this year, for example, the U.K. newspaper The Guardian published an account of two previously unpublished sketches—typed out completely by Keaton, most likely in the 1950s—that spell out two of his gags. The discovery was likened by Alek Lev, vice president of the International Buster Keaton Society, to a “holy relic.”

This Day in Film History (Birth of Harold Lloyd, Silent ‘Man on the Clock’)

Apr. 20, 1893— Harold Lloyd, a comparatively neglected “third genius” in a silent-comedy triumvirate with Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, was born in a humble, three-room home in Burchard, Neb. It was a far cry from the 44-room mansion on a 16-acre Beverly Hills estate that he built from his earnings as the progenitor of “daredevil comedy.”

You won’t find a Lloyd character making a cute appearance in a TV commercial, as Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” did for IBM in the 1980s. Nor will you see many retrospectives of his work, as Keaton has enjoyed courtesy of worshipful film historians.

It’s a surprise, then, to learn that Lloyd made more films and more money at his height than these now more celebrated contemporaries. And though he never achieved the same level of success in the sound era that he did in the silent period, he took to the talkies with a greater eagerness than Chaplin and Keaton.

Unlike those two stars, Lloyd learned the art of comedy not through vaudeville but on movie sets. Though he started as an extra with Universal Studios and worked for a while with Mack Sennett, his principal early association was with Hal Roach (later, the producer of the films of Laurel and Hardy and the Our Gang comedies). 

There he tried several knockoffs of Chaplin’s tramp—“Just Nuts,” “Willie Work,” and “Lonesome Luke”—before, feeling creatively stagnant, he stumbled on the infinitely adaptable figure, though with his own distinct look and style, that would make him famous: “The Boy Next Door” or, more familiarly, the “Glasses Character.”

Benjamin Wright astutely noted three years ago that the transformative effect of Lloyd’s famous horn rims: “For Lloyd, the glasses make him seem common and they also challenge the general perception that men with glasses are more serious and astute, a perception that perhaps helps Lloyd elicit greater laughs.” Or, as the actor marveled: “At a cost of 75 cents they provide a trademark recognized instantly wherever pictures are shown."

Not long after he developed his distinctive persona, however, Lloyd’s career almost ended before it had a chance to really take off. An accident, incurred while posing for a photograph with what he thought was a fake bomb, cost him a thumb and a forefinger. Thereafter he concealed the damage by wearing flesh-colored prosthetic gloves and hiding his right hand whenever photographed.

Perhaps the most famous shot in silent-film history came in Lloyd’s Safety Last! (1923), when his character dangled frightening but determinedly from a clock tower high above a heavily-trafficked street. The scene was shot so realistically that many viewers (including critic Walter Kerr, in his otherwise authoritative The Silent Clowns) believed that it was actual. 

But Lloyd’s own description, years after the fact, had already divulged, amid its laborious explanation, that an elaborate sequence—i.e., technical tricks—was required to convey the impression:

“We did the final scenes of that climb first. We didn't know what we were going to have for the beginning of it. We hadn't made up the opening and after we found that we had, in our opinion, a very, very good thrill sequence, something that was going to be popular and bring in a few shekels, we went back and figured out what we would do for a beginning, and then worked on up to what we already had.”

The whole thing involved building small three- and four-story buildings on hills, followed by clever editing—and, finally, the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief.

Why has Lloyd’s reputation stayed largely in decline while Chaplin and Keaton continue to be remembered? Several explanations, all with a certain amount of plausibility, have been offered over the years:

*Critics wedded to the “auteur” theory do not adequately credit Lloyd as the principal creative force of his films. Lloyd did not particularly care about receiving credits as a director or writer for any of his movies—after all, as head of the company that produced his films, he was intimately involved in the careful shaping of gags. But, in the eyes of some critics, the lack of these additional critics led his overall creative contribution to his movies to be overlooked.

*The limitations of early TV, with their small screens and plethora of commercials, so annoyed Lloyd that he refused use of his films to be shown, thereby limiting exposure to a potential younger generation of fans. As owner of his work, Lloyd feared loss of control in the then-new medium. Not just smaller screens, but incorrect projection speeds and a multitude of commercials ensured that viewers would not be able to appreciate his work under the same conditions as a filmgoer in the 1920s. Eventually he was prevailed upon to release two compilations in the early 1960s: Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy and Harold Lloyd's Funny Side of Life.

*Much of Lloyd’s early work was lost in a fire on his estate. In August 1943, a nitrate fire and explosion destroyed many of the films that Lloyd had bought from their distributor five years before. The loss mortified Lloyd, an early film preservationist. Because many of the lost movies were made before 1919, there has been less chance to analyze the development of his art over time.

*The ever-optimistic nature of Lloyd’s “glasses” character has not been universally embraced by critics who favor the darker undertones in Chaplin and Keaton. “Harold Lloyd—he’s surely the most underrated [comedian] of them all,” observed Orson Welles, his friend and fellow magician. “The intellectuals don’t like the Harold Lloyd character—that middle-class, middle-American, all-American college boy. There’s no obvious poetry to it.” In contrast, Chaplin's critique of capitalism was front and center in Modern Times, and Keaton's triumphs offer onscreen occur as much in spite of as because of his actions--an almost existentialist conception of human beings' ability to shape change.

Lloyd's breathless energy manifested itself not just in the comedies he created at his peak but in the hobbies he pursued afterward: philanthropy, chess, bowling, microscopy, painting, and especially 3-D photography (in his last two decades he took close to 300,000 stereo slides).

"If great comedy must involve something beyond laughter,” critic-novelist James Agee wrote in his influential 1949 essay on silent comedy, “Comedy's Greatest Era,” “Lloyd was not a great comedian. If plain laughter is any criterion — and it is a healthy counter-balance to the other — few people have equalled him, and nobody has ever beaten him."

Most filmgoers don’t even realize that much of what they are watching today originated nearly 100 years ago with Lloyd. Those frenetic Jackie Chan films requiring breathtaking athleticism and comic skill from its star? That, surely, is from the Lloyd template. The romantic comedy involving an average guy winning out against overwhelming odds by sheer manic energy? Part of the Lloyd brand. The names of the titular heroes of the Farrelly Brothers’ Dumb and Dumber? Harold and Lloyd—duh!!!!

Even Lloyd’s many possessions have shown up on the big screen. Paramount borrowed his Rolls Royce to serve as William Holden’s vehicle of pleasure in Sabrina, and his mansion would be used in The Godfather (1972), Westworld (1973), Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Commando (1985).

“The more trouble you get a man into, the more comedy you get out of him,” Lloyd once noted. In 1953, four years after the failure of his last sound film, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, Hollywood bestowed an honorary Oscar on the “good citizen” and “beloved Freshman" who had “permanently dislocated the funny bone of America,” Harold Lloyd.