Review: Two New Biographies of Buster Keaton

Keaton was as a lot a technical innovator as he was a comic book, and Curtis’s e book goes into painstaking element about how these results had been achieved. (The spinning home was constructed on a turntable whose management belt was buried in dust and grass.) Each bit as essential, “Buster Keaton” serves as a welcome corrective to the notion that Keaton’s was a tragic life undone by drink and the appearance of the talkies. This delusion is partly a perform of Keaton’s persuasiveness as an actor in his later years: grimly staring down his dropping hand as one of many washed-up old-Hollywood “waxworks” who play playing cards with Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s “Sundown Boulevard” (1950) and impassively dancing the twist with the bikini-clad starlet Bobbi Shaw within the teensploitation flick “Seaside Blanket Bingo” (1965, a 12 months earlier than his demise).

Curtis doesn’t shrink back from Keaton’s rock-bottom Nineteen Thirties, when he misplaced his inventive autonomy at MGM, wriggled out of a loveless marriage to his first spouse, Natalie Talmadge, and drank so closely that he was, for a time, unemployable. However the total image he paints is of an even-keeled showbiz lifer who was merely pleased to maintain on working. In contrast to lots of his contemporaries, Keaton by no means appeared down on tv, warming early to its potential to achieve thousands and thousands. He hosted a range program on an area station in Los Angeles and starred in intelligent advertisements for Alka-Seltzer; Curtis notes that Keaton considered TV commercials “as little comedy shorts akin to the two-reelers” that he made in his youth. One Easter Sunday within the Nineteen Sixties, he stopped by a celebration hosted by Mary Pickford and pitied the silent-movie stars in attendance. “I found we had nothing to speak about,” Keaton stated. “A few of them had by no means heard a Beatles document. They hadn’t stored up with the instances.”

Keaton’s last act was a contented victory lap during which he lived modestly within the San Fernando Valley city of Woodland Hills, fortunately married to his third spouse, Eleanor Norris, and cognizant of the renewed esteem during which his silent movies had been held. The shortage of operatic highs and lows in Keaton’s life could make Curtis’s straight-ahead, sequentially narrated bio a slog when you’re not a dedicated Buster Boi, however it’s as definitive an account of the sad-faced comic as one may hope for.

Dana Stevens’s “Digital camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Daybreak of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century” is a welcome complement, in that Stevens, a film critic for Slate, contextualizes Keaton’s achievements in a approach that Curtis doesn’t. In a sublime preface, Stevens positions 1895, the 12 months of Keaton’s delivery, as a crucially transitional time, “not but the twentieth century however the still-illegible signal of what it would develop into.” Marconi has solely simply succeeded at “transmitting radio waves over a substantial distance.” Freud is struck by the concept to investigate his sufferers by decoding their goals. And within the basement of a Paris cafe, the Lumière brothers display their transferring photos for a paying viewers for the primary time.

Buster emerges within the new century as an agent of what we’d now name disruption. He, Chaplin and Keaton’s filmmaking mentor, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, aren’t simply funnymen however entrepreneurs, early adopters of recent expertise whose smarts and foresight earn them tons of cash and admiration. Just like the tech bros of as we speak, they meet a blended bag of fates. Chaplin is probably the most revered however spends his later life in a gilded jail of his personal self-importance and melancholy. Arbuckle is introduced low by a scandal during which he’s charged with killing a younger actress and later exonerated, however not earlier than his profession is left in ruins. (Stevens, a fierce Arbuckle defender, portrays Keaton as a loyal buddy who provides the post-scandal Roscoe work as a gag author and uncredited co-director.) Keaton is the least business-minded — horrible at deal making, therefore his endless gigging — however probably the most purely inventive, a workaholic whose ardour is pondering up gags.

Stevens clearly adores her topic, describing him as a “solemn, stunning, perpetually airborne man.” “Digital camera Man” is much less a standard biography than a sequence of reported essays in regards to the progress of the twentieth century with Keaton at their heart. Generally Stevens ventures too far afield, as when she devotes the higher a part of a chapter to an pointless examination of the Hollywood struggles of F. Scott Fitzgerald — a person with whom Keaton was apparently unacquainted — on the grounds that each males had been alcoholics with marital troubles who had been unhappily employed at MGM on the identical time.

However Stevens is sharper when she focuses on such ancillary phenomena because the emergence of significant movie criticism, a wholly new writerly self-discipline. She flags the exact second, in a evaluate of Keaton’s 1923 characteristic “Three Ages,” when Life journal’s Robert Sherwood “pushes movie criticism in a brand new route as he brings occasions outdoors the theater to bear on his expertise inside it” by praising Keaton’s capacity “to maintain this much-molested human race in good humor, at a time when it has nothing however excessive taxes, United States senators, coal strikes, banana shortages, mistaken numbers and Signor Mussolini to consider.”

Almost 100 years later, as we face a virtually equivalent listing of vexations, give or take a surname, Keaton’s lovingly created shorts and options nonetheless have this useful impact. Curtis and Stevens have carried out properly to carry the boy with the funeral expression again from the lifeless.