After another five films - A Reckless Romeo, The Rough House, His Wedding Night. Oh. Doctor! and Fatty at Coney Island (all 1917) - the whole team moved to California. It took with it Keaton's family and one of the Talmadge sisters, Natalie. Very much in the shadow of her more famous sisters Norma and Constance, Natalie worked in a secretarial position at the studios where the Keatons met her. She became a special favourite of Myra's.

accidents will happen

It was a foregone conclusion that Buster and Natalie would marry, not that there weren't many other girls in his life. As part of the Hollywood community, among a dazzling circle of friends including Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, W.S. Hart and Rudolph Valentino, the private and habitually non-committal Buster found himself to be, like Arbuckle, very public property, his existence stage-managed for the benefit of the press. His marriage in 1921 gives the impression (as indeed do his two subsequent marriages, to Mae Scribbens in 1933 and to Eleanor Norris in 1940) of having occurred without his full comprehension, like the innumerable natural disasters in his films. With Natalie came the rest of the Talmadge family, who enlisted Louise Keaton (Buster's sister) as a stand-in for Norma, shared the Keaton residence (a huge Italian Villa was built for them all at Beverly Hills in 1925), and determined after the birth of their two sons that Natalie should have no more children. The divorce was not until 1932, a final blow when Keaton's fortunes were already in battered shape, but the marriage had finished years earlier. The Talmadges don't even rate a mention in Keaton's 1960 'autobiography', My Wonderful World of Slapstick.

the cameraman
(1928)

Buster made six two-reelers with Arbuckle in California - A Country Hero (1917), in which Joe Keaton also appeared. Out West, The Bell Boy. Moonshine, Good Night, Nurse! and The Cook (all 1918). He was then drafted in mid-1918 and spent seven months entertaining the troops in France. During this time he caught an ear infection that rendered him partially deaf for the rest of his life. When he returned in 1919, it was to find Arbuckle preparing to move into feature production, though they completed three more two-reelers together - Back Stage, The Hayseed (both 1919), and The Garage (1920). Joseph Schenck then offered Buster his own company on a handshake deal, and what was to be the golden era of Keaton comedy was under way, sadly and ironically aided by the collapse of Arbuckle's separate career following the scandal of 1921. From 1920 to 1923 Keaton made one feature (The Saphead, 1920) and 19 shorts, followed by 10 further features in the five years to 1928 when he changed producer.

the general
(1926)

If it was thanks to his brother-in-law (Schenck was married to Norma Talmadge) that Buster had no shares in his own company and finally made 'the biggest mistake of my life' by moving to MGM, it was also under Schenck's protection that he enjoyed in the last glorious years of silent cinema a seemingly limitless freedom to make whatever he liked, with no budgetary strings and no front-office interference. He was in peak condition as an athlete, he was inexhaustible on less than five hours sleep a night, he could drink copiously without side-effects, and if he needed a steam- engine or an ocean liner, they bought him one. But after this period never again would he have total control of his creativity, and never again would his films reflect the sheer uncluttered exuberance of his comic timing and his magical visual sense.

the general
(1926)

The hallmark of a Keaton comedy is the energy of its central character, all the animation that others display on their faces being expressed by Buster in a headlong ballet of acrobatics which he performed himself, in long-shot and without cuts. There is no trickery about the log-bouncing scene in The General, or Buster's high dive from the top of the ship in The Navigator, or the vaulting ease with which he skims down the riverboat decks in Steamboat Bill Jr (1928) and all the way up again a moment later. In Spite Marriage, a single shot follows his desperate battle with the villain from one end of the luxury yacht to the other where, flung into the ocean, he is carried by the current back to the lifeboat trailing at the stern and hauls himself up over the side to resume the struggle. During his career, as he often reported in later years, he broke every bone in his body. In The Paleface (1921) he dropped 85 feet from a suspension bridge into a net, he was nearly drowned under a waterfall in Our Hospitality (1923), and during the train sequence in Sherlock. Jr (1924) he actually broke his neck yet continued stunting and filming despite months of blinding headaches.

where there's a will . . .

Nevertheless, it's not as a stuntman but as a unique tragi-comic personality that he survives as the most fascinating of the silent comedians. As if pursuing a redefinition of his private experience, his films illustrate the purgatorial struggles of an inconsequential reject, habitually bullied by a scornful father or disdainfully ignored by an unappreciative girl, who by sheer persistence and ingenuous courage (physical danger never seems to occur to him as a possibility) battles his way to social acceptability. In his tenacious war against the forces of evil, his endurance in restoring the rightness of things, and his enigmatic face that gives nothing away - no promises, no denials - he is one of the screen's great martyrs. Yet at the same time, he has an uncanny gift for adapting technology to provide unexpected comforts; he uses a swordfish for protection, a boiler for a bedroom and a lobster-pot for an egg-holder in The Navigator, lazy tongs for a traffic indicator and a telephone for controlling a horse in Cops (1922), and can whip up a brisk asbestos suit in order to survive burning at the stake in The Paleface. As if in reward for his ingenuity, and for his obvious innocence, Providence is on his side, carrying him placidly off in an airborn canoe at the end of The Balloonatic (1923), or dropping the two-ton facade of a building over his body - he stands exactly where an empty window-frame drops over him - in that hair-raising shot from Steamboat Bill, Jr (even the cameraman, legend has it, couldn't bear to watch) leaving him dusty but unscathed.

spite marriage
(1929)

At his best, Keaton's films found their least enthusiastic audience. While The General looks like a masterpiece today, it was a disaster when first released. Yet his MGM comedies of the early Thirties, The Passionate Plumber, Speak Easily (both 1932) and What! No.Beer? (1933), uneasily teaming him with Jimmy Durante, and contemptuously regarded by Keaton him- self, were huge moneyspinners. He took refuge from them, and from a movie business becom- ing increasingly incomprehensible, in pro- longed periods of alcoholism, and waited through 17 lacklustre years of mediocrity, bit- parts, and gag-writing for other, lesser comedians, until, with Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Limelight (1952), the world began to notice him again. Then television provided a new home, and the final decade of his life afforded him a comfortable income from chat-shows, television commercials, and personal appearances at which, with a growing awareness, his audiences showed a genuine interest in the films that at first release had been taken so casually for granted. If the magnificent photography was now somewhat dimmed by chemical changes. Buster's own technical virtuosity still took the breath away. And as a symbol of the average man, struggling to find his place in a hostile society but unable to 'get away from himself, the great stone face speaks today with ever-increasing clarity.

Buster Keaton - A Hard Act To Follow Dvd Review

[ b u s t e r   k e a t o n   :   f i l m o g r a p h y ]

Filmography

As actor only in shorts: