Film comedian Buster Keaton was born on this day in 1895 (he died in 1966.) I almost wrote "silent film comedian" as if that's all he ever was, but Keaton did a good deal of acting in talkies once they arrived, and, later, television. However, it's the 13 years he spent miming in front of a camera that he's best known for. Not just here in the US, but all over the world. Here's an interview Keaton did for Swedish TV in 1960:
I like the way Buster felt he just could go tap that mike after he saw the other fellow do it. He came in loud and clear so it must have worked.
Keaton says in the above clip that he first met Charlie Chaplin in 1912. At that time neither were movie stars or even in movies at all. They were stage actors, Keaton in vaudeville and Chaplin touring the United States with British music hall impresario Fred Karno's comedy troupe (of which Stan Laurel was also a member.) They both went into movies at first just to make a few extra bucks and ended up finding their calling. But was one call louder than the other? To what degree were they rivals? They're now seen by many as having been in this neck-to-neck competition to see who was the funniest mute on celluloid, but that's not how it actually played out during their silent film heyday, a silent film heyday in which Chaplin already had a few years head start on Keaton. If you were to compare it to 1960s rock, Chaplin would be the Beatles, transforming an art form that hadn't even been around all that long, and transforming it to such a commercially successful degree that the act existed in a strata all its own, impossibly above and beyond the reach of the nearest competition. So does that make Buster Keaton the Rolling Stones? Not necessarily. A third player, Harold Lloyd, performed slightly better at the box office. Keaton may have been more The Who or the Doors. But that's when these guys were all still alive. Since their deaths (Lloyd in 1971, Chaplin in '77), there's been reassessments, and even more reassessments. Film scholars now rank Lloyd number three (no shame in that; they all still think he's a very funny guy) and argue whether, artistically if not commercially, Chaplin or Keaton should be number one. The more years, the more decades, that go by, the more these scholars give Keaton the edge. What's causing Chaplin to slip some (and only some) in the rankings? Back when he still mostly was making two-reelers, i.e., short films, critics began referring to Chaplin as an "artist", which he most certainly was, but arguably he was not all that conscious of this artistry. His formal education having ended at age 13, as a music hall entertainer he would have been expected to do just that, entertain, be funny for funny's sake, and nothing of a more lofty nature. Once he became aware that he was being referred to as an artist, Chaplin in fact did take a more lofty approach, increasingly injecting seriousness into the comic hijinks. That seriousness, however, often took the form of sentimentality ("a laugh, and perhaps a tear" the viewer is told to expect at the beginning of The Kid.) He didn't go overboard and get all icky the way Jerry Lewis or Red Skelton often did, but 80, 90, 100 years later, that sentimentality doesn't seem as artistically significant as it once did. As for Buster Keaton (whose formal education was at best intermittent), while his films got generally good reviews, nobody in the 1920s saw anything particularly profound about them, and he was therefore free to be funny for funny's sake. Except that 55 years after his death, film scholars aren't so sure he was being funny for funny's sake, as they look deeper into his work and find that his films are brimming with social observations and psychological insights. As Steve Martin once said, comedy is not pretty.
However the film scholars and film historians and film buffs rank Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, what did these two very talented comedians think of each other?
They seem to have been friends, often visiting each other's sets. Keaton was also in Chaplin's employ during two different periods of his life. In the 1920s, when he made a few films for United Artists, which at that time was 1/4 owned by Chaplin. More significantly, in 1952, when his career had reached its nadir and Chaplin decided to help him out by giving him a part in Limelight, the only time the two appeared together on screen. I was thinking of showing you a clip of them, which comes toward the end of the film, but the emphasis is on Chaplin (for sound artistic reasons; his character makes a showbiz comeback that ends in tragedy) and this post is about Keaton. So I got something else for you instead.
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