Great Stone Face

By Stefan Kanfer

The greener the comedian, the more he breaks up at his own material. As he ripens, his laughter becomes muted, his smiles iron out. But outside of rigor mortis, he can never approach the rigidity of the Great Stone Face.

That face can be seen in a remarkable Buster Keaton retrospective soon to go on a U.S. tour. In it are 21 two-reelers and ten features, many unseen for decades. The show, produced by Film Curator Raymond Rohauer, began one afternoon in 1954, when Keaton, then 59, invited Rohauer to inspect his garage in Los Angeles. "I want to put some electric trains in here," said the man who had never grown up. "You want this stuff?" The "stuff" turned out to be Keaton's masterpieces, filmed on ancient--and explosive--nitrate stock. "I begged him to put out his cigarette before he blew us up," recalls Rohauer, "but Buster just kept saying, 'No danger, no danger.' "

If Keaton had a coat of arms, that phrase would have been his motto. His father, Vaudevillian Joe Keaton, took Buster into the family act in 1898 at the age of three as "the human mop." Pop literally swept the floor with him. The kid became a great stone pebble, and made hazard a part of his persona.

Savoring Keaton's films, the late James Agee once wrote: "Barring only the best of Chaplin, they seem to me the most wonderful comedies ever made." The comparison is inescapable; the two geniuses dominated silent comedy. The difference in their styles was marked: Chaplin, the gothic Pagliacci, wore his art upon his sleeve. Much as he wanted laughter, he craved significance more. Keaton was too busy with sight gags to realize that he was a major surrealist.

In Sherlock Jr., he rode the handlebars of a driverless motorcycle. In Steamboat Bill Jr., he flew through the air on a trunkless tree. In Our Hospitality, he went over a waterfall. When he employed sleight of lens, it was to achieve effects normally seen only on canvas. In The Frozen North, he climbed subway stairs--and emerged in Alaska. In The Playhouse, he staged a minstrel show with nine Busters. In the Pirandelloesque Daydreams, he left life to climb into a film within a film.

Keaton's career crisis was the overfamiliar chronicle of the silent-screen star undone by talkies. Alcoholism and poverty followed the decline. It was not until the '50s that he was rediscovered and merchandised in Ford commercials and films like Beach Blanket Bingo. Such travesties are happily omitted from the Rohauer restoration. Instead, there are the fabulous originals, now preserved on celluloid stock --works like The General, a Civil War comedy which could have been photographed by Mathew Brady, and the complex and hilarious Navigator, deservedly Keaton's biggest moneymaker.

Keaton once confessed that there were two of him, "Me and my understudy, Buster II. Buster II could do anything --play and never get tired, be rich and handsome, never grow old. And write checks until the cows came home." Buster I died worn and neglected in 1966. Buster II is alive and funny, in the best film festival of any year.

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