by Tim Bowling
What redeems Our Hospitality is what redeems every single one of Keaton’s films, and especially the weaker ones: the man himself. I have exactly the same reaction to Woody Allen’s comedies. When he’s on the screen, I’m engaged, delightfully tense with comic anticipation; when he’s not on the screen, I lose interest. It’s that way with Keaton, too. There’s so much life and energy in his persona, so much barely repressed vitality, so much obvious acting confidence and athletic grace. The only way I can sit through a film like Our Hospitality is by concentrating on Keaton.
That is exactly why Sherlock Jr. is as wonderful, fresh and engaging as the earlier feature is dull, stale and tired. In the entire forty-five minutes running time (Our Hospitality is a painful thirty minutes longer), Buster is rarely off the screen. He is the film. And what a lively, inventive, clever and entertaining film it is. How much fun Keaton must have had making it; you can feel the joy of creation just flowing off those black-and-white faces. Buster plays a lowly projectionist in a theatre who dreams of being a famous detective. Falsely accused of stealing a watch from his love interest’s father (played by Keaton’s real-life father, who looks exactly like the abusive drunken roughneck he was), Buster sadly returns to work, starts the projector whirring and promptly falls asleep. What happens next is cinematic history, pure genius, the reason why Keaton is held in such high esteem fifty years after his death, eighty years after his greatest period of fame.
A ghostly dream-Keaton steps out of the body of the sleeping projectionist and stares at the screen of the running film. The film characters suddenly become the characters of the real-life story: there’s the love interest, there’s the lounge lizard who framed Buster and who wants to get his girl. Alarmed, the dream-Keaton tries to wake his sleeping self, but to no avail. Desperate, and with no other choice, the dream-Keaton rushes down the aisle of the theatre and launches himself into the action on the screen. The villain immediately boots him back into the theatre. We see all this from the viewpoint of the projection booth, over the heads of the audience. Uncowed, the dream-Keaton clambers back into the movie. Now the real fun begins, the director Keaton’s giddy expression of his love for his medium. On the screen within the screen, the editing process rapidly transfers Buster from one perilous moment to another. As he approaches a door, the image cuts and he’s in a garden. He decides to sit on a garden chair, but the image cuts to a busy street and he sits down backwards, somersaulting into speeding traffic. He starts to walk along the street and suddenly finds himself teetering on the edge of a cliff. Looking down, he stares into a lion’s mouth. In rapid succession, he’s almost hit by a train, then winds up sitting again, but the shot cuts to an island. He dives off into the sea but lands headfirst in a snowdrift, legs kicking helplessly in the air. Eventually he finds himself back in the garden. All of this happens with the breathless, unpredictable leaping of metaphor, which explains why James Agee described Keaton as a poet. And from this point on, the pace of Sherlock Jr. is relentless and the narrative gripping.
The screen within the screen disappears, and now the movie version of the dream-Keaton’s experience is all we see. All we see is a dizzying succession of chase-and-escape gags, with Buster as the famous detective, Sherlock Jr., outwitting the villains. Among the many remarkable stunts – including the wild ride on the handlebars of a motorcycle without a driver – is the legendary waterspout incident. Buster – hot on the trail of the lounge lizard (also known as the tea hound or the sheik) – is trapped in a railroad refrigerator car by the villain. He escapes by emerging through a trap door on top of the train, then proceeds to walk across the cars from right to left as the train begins to move, the camera panning expertly to keep him in the centre of the shot. Remember – the real man, Buster Keaton, is actually doing this, as a kind of stunt double for his dream double. Finally, he leaps off the last car, grabs the chain of an overhead waterspout and, his weight bringing down the chute, gets doused by a tremendous torrent of water, so powerful that he crashes hard to the track. The entire sequence is continuous and unfaked.
Perhaps its beginning is an even more delightful, if less dramatic, display of athleticism. When Buster trails the villain, he really trails the villain – right on his heels, mimicking every move, right down to tossing a cigarette butt over his shoulder after he’d puffed on it (he had caught the one just tossed by the villain). All his years of vaudeville training came to the fore here – no athlete in the history of sport has ever required more timing and revelled in the requirement. No comedian ever understood the gag power of repetition and duplication better than Keaton. What makes the trailing so funny, in fact, is the situation, which relies heavily on characterization. Already, as a viewer, our sympathies are with the boy-projectionist; he’s the wronged one, the underdog, and he’s vulnerable and awkward and trying so hard to be otherwise that we recognize him immediately as our double, the doppelgänger of the human condition. That isn’t funny, though; it’s too serious. As biographer Rudi Blesh accurately exclaims, “Keaton did not do the serious picture because he is too serious and because he is an artist.” What is funny about the duplication/replication is that the villainous lounge lizard is tall and debonair with a graceful waxed moustache, while the would-be detective is short, decidedly unsophisticated and sports a fake moustache – not the double, but the opposite. And, of course, the gag of the amateur detective trailing job is so common and overused now (every sitcom on TV has used it, ad infinitum) that to see one from 1924 that remains so witty and fresh is a revelation. What is revealed is Keaton’s incredible physical ability, borne out of his long, do-it-yourself vaudeville training. That waterspout scene? The idea was that, using the rope to swing to the ground, he’d open the spout. Well, the volume of water shooting out was much greater than anticipated and struck Keaton with such force that he lost his grip on the rope and fell backwards onto the track, his neck snapping down on the steel rails. As Keaton ruefully explained decades later, “Conditioning is the one thing, I suppose, that can enable a man to walk around unaware that he has a broken neck.”
Neck, schmeck. Keaton was long accustomed to such mishaps; in fact, they’ve become, or rather they already were at the height of his fame, the stuff of legend. How about the unbelievable day in July 1898 when he was not quite three years old? A sweltering Kansas afternoon, and Buster’s parents, busy on stage, had left him in the care of the landlady of the boarding house. In quick succession, though not quite as quick as the editing work in Sherlock Jr., the toddler Buster jammed his fingers into a clothes wringer, hit himself in the head with a rock and, most dramatically of all, was swept out of the boarding house’s second-floor window by a cyclone. After the same doctor had amputated half of little Buster’s jammed finger and stitched the gash in his temple, the legend really takes off. The cyclone-enveloped Buster is whirled high over the trees and houses and set down unharmed in the middle of the street four blocks away, where his relieved parents find him. Apparently, this too-astonishing trinity of mishaps settled the matter. No more babysitting landladies; from that day on, little Buster was a part of the act.
Twenty-three years later, the risk-taking and the accidents took centre stage again, leading to the short film The Playhouse, which leads to Sherlock Jr. Keaton was making The Electric House, which involved mechanizing the set to suit the title and setting up numerous gags. At one point, Buster caught one of his floppy slap shoes in the escalator, which had unpredictably sped up, and his foot jammed at the top. Snaaap! His ankle broke, the slap shoe tore off and he fell ten feet to the studio floor. To summarize, Keaton had to wear a cast for the next seven weeks. So The Electric House was shelved as he convalesced. Bored and restless, unable to work, he decided to take the train to New York and get married (more on that ill-advised decision later). Finally, with the cast just off, Keaton was ready to make movies again, but, with his recovering ankle, he simply couldn’t do the usual falls and chases. What he came up with as a substitute is typical of his genius. “We don’t
need falls and chases,” he told his crew. “I’ll be the entire cast.” He then detailed his vision of a picture in which only Buster Keaton appears, in hilarious multiples. “The whole picture is a visual gag. I hardly have to do anything.”
I hadn’t come to The Playhouse in my movie marathon yet. I was still under the spell of Sherlock Jr. In fact, I had enjoyed it so much that, despite the late hour and my own fatigue, despite the fact that I knew I would eventually go off and rejoin the responsible world, I decided to watch the film again.
I made it to the waterspout scene and began to fade. My head dropped, then snapped back. I saw the rapid black-and-white images as if they were part of a dream: a man was running along the top of a moving train; he was bouncing along on the handlebars of a speeding motorcycle; he was crashing through the window of a shack and colliding with another man. I left my own body on the sofa, and blinked down at it in curiosity. Who was this almost fifty-year-old person asleep with a DVD remote spilled from his hand? Why wouldn’t he wake up when I reached out and shook him?
I could see that it was no use. I had broken from the cocoon and would be, for as long as the illusion lasted, the man I was born to be – not a detective, not an acrobat or an actor or a teacher, but a human worker with exposed nerves borne back ceaselessly into the past.
I WOKE WITH a crick in my neck and a mouth as dry as laundry lint. The TV screen was frozen to the menu of a DVD. The tinkling piano so often associated with silent film played the same refrain over and over until I had no choice but to flap my hand around, grasp the remote and hit mute. Then I sat in the silence and let the world creep across my consciousness, the way sound and booze had crept across Keaton’s in the 1930s, the way the cop’s flashlight beam had crept across Paul Reubens in the adult theatre. Outside it was still the late summer of 2012 – noise, speed, the adulation of money and power. Outside, linked together like boxcars and stretched from coast to coast, were endless classrooms of bored teenagers holding gadgets of ineffective distraction in their hands. Outside, Keaton and my father were dead.
With mounting panic, I checked my watch. Five-thirty. In five and a half hours I’d be standing in front of a room full of strangers, as prepared as anyone’s ever prepared for fate. There was no point in going to bed now. I decided to shower and head out early to a café to put together some kind of introductory lecture. The thought unsettled me. All my nerve endings twitched. In thirty years I’d be seventy-eight, my father’s age when he died, eight years more than Keaton managed. So why this anxiety now?
I hit play, then fast-forward and the black-and-white images flew by, faster than the jumped-up speed silent movies always played at for decades after the glory days had ended. When I hit pause, there was Buster in the projection booth, twitching and falling off his chair – the dream over, the film within the film over, normal, regular life resumed. But was it? The girl rushes in. She tells him that she knows he’s innocent, that he was framed. All is forgiven. Now Buster has to make his move. Confused, he looks to the movie screen for help. Up there, the original detective-hero takes the original girl’s hand. Buster does the same with his girl. The hero kisses the hand. Buster follows suit. Next, a long, passionate kiss. Buster delivers a peck on the cheek. Finally the screen cuts to an image of the hero-detective holding two babies on his lap. Sherlock Jr. ends with Buster’s legendary face, frozen and yet pregnant with meaning. He blinks and blinks. So this is life, this is what it comes to? The expression on the comedian’s face offers no clear insight. Fatty Arbuckle would have winked at the camera; most comedians today would find some obvious way to suggest that this fate was a death knell for a man. Keaton suggests this, but good-naturedly. After all, he’s young still himself, he’s been married for a brief time, he’s the father of two little boys – where’s it all leading? He doesn’t know. What he does know is that life won’t ever be the same; that time marches on; that the dream, the illusion, must give way to reality.
He blinks, he picks up his briefcase, he enters a classroom and says, “A complete English sentence must contain a subject and a verb.” He says, “A complete human life must contain loss and gags.” Buster runs. That’s a complete sentence. Sherlock Jr. tails the villain and Buster Keaton never makes a feature film of his own after 1928. That’s a complete life. Or, Buster Keaton films The General, one of cinema’s greatest accomplishments, and receives a twenty-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival the year before his death. An old man, he blinks and blinks, tears in his eyes. Soon, illusion and reality as he knows them will be gone. That’s also a complete life.
And it’s full of fragments.
I couldn’t rise from the couch. I started Sherlock Jr. again. It was only forty-five minutes long, one of Keaton’s shortest features, apparently because audiences at the preview screening found the concept either confusing or disturbing, so a lot of footage was cut. I had forty-five minutes; that was slightly more than one minute per one year of my life. Surely I could afford that much.
I settled back into the illusion with a sigh. That face! That iconic face looking up over a book on how to be a detective, except there’s a thick Victorian moustache where there should only be white skin. The gag, always the gag – even in a straitjacket after a bad case of the DT’s, even forgotten, even after Natalie left him and changed the boys’ names to her own and he was just an old waxwork muttering, “Pass. Pass.” A man could put his faith in the gag, because his faith had to go somewhere. And if it didn’t . . . Clyde Bruckman, gag man extraordinaire, Keaton’s co-writer almost from the very beginning, killed himself in 1962. Killed himself with a gun he’d borrowed from his old pal, Buster. How funny is that? Is it real or an illusion? I settled back to revel in the gags of a suicide. When I was done, when I had showered and put on clean clothes and brushed my teeth, when I had quietly left the house so as not to wake my family, I simply did not know how I would continue to the completion of my sentence and my life.
IT WAS STILL DARK but approaching light, just as in a movie theatre in the seconds before the curtain draws back. Or at least in those older kinds of theatres. I hadn’t been to a mall-o-plex ad-orgy, or whatever modern first-run theatres were currently called, since about the time Pee-wee Herman’s bike was stolen. And yes, I was certain Paul Reubens, the actor who played Pee-wee, had the classic 1948 Italian neo-realist film, The Bicycle Thieves, in mind. It wasn’t a comedy, but bicycles – as anyone familiar with Flann O’Brien’s brilliant novel The Third Policeman will attest – are funny. Indeed, when Keaton first appears on screen in Our Hospitality, he’s riding a penny farthing, an ancient contraption of a bike with a gigantic Ferris wheel of a front wheel – it’s a delightful image in an otherwise overrated film.
Normally, I ride my mountain bike to campus. It’s a pleasant journey, one Keaton would have loved, for, halfway through it, I pedal over the High Level Bridge, an impressively high, coal-black girdered railroad bridge built in 1912. In fact, as I pick up speed as I reach the span, I often forget to change gears and I pump the pedals as rapidly and ridiculously as any silent screen comedian ever did until my momentum returns me to the twenty-first century and the real world of finger-giving drivers and impatience and the terrible class struggle that no one’s even allowed to acknowledge.
I wasn’t going to campus, at least not yet. It was only six-forty, and I didn’t have my first class until eleven. I stood under a huge, overarching Dutch elm, its branches as black as bridge girders, and listened to the absence of birdsong. I knew that songbirds, like so many other things, were dying out, but I was rarely up at the hour when the absence was so obvious and, well, unnerving. The natural world was giving us a new silence, but it wasn’t art. I suppose it was the silence of death, but that idea wasn’t going to help me face my life, or even my day. So I shook it off, the way sparrows in my childhood shook raindrops off their wings as they perched on telephone wires.
Of course I didn’t really shake it off. North America constantly shakes the idea of deat
h off, but I was intent on shaking North America off. And Keaton was obviously the key; Keaton was the pilgrim’s guide through hell. I could only hope there’d be a paradise at the end of the journey.
I began to walk through the dark wood, musing, half-plotting, remembering. Edmonton had been a stop on the vaudeville circuit – not a glamorous, big-time stop, but vaudevillians were, by and large, down-to-earth folk, unfussy and practical; they’d follow the money, go where the work was. The Three Keatons very likely came through Edmonton, at a time when my own family – my paternal great-grandparents and their children – lived here. Maybe they even saw the legendary act and one of the world’s greatest filmmakers in the flesh. It was certainly possible. My grandparents were long dead and my great-grandparents were barely even photographic images. As for Edmonton’s most famous vaudeville theatre, it had vanished along with every other building from that era. But I knew where the city’s missing and sparkling tooth had been. Right downtown. Vaguely, I turned my body and its double lenses in that direction, all the while keeping one lens wide for the reappearance of the silent little man on the telephone wire.
A bus approached as I neared the stop at 99th Street. In the dark, its silent and empty glide of light struck me as cinematic. Here was the modern Sherlock Jr. projectionist, almost asleep at the wheel, dragging a cut scene from filmdom’s glory days behind him. A city of strangers, boarding one by one in the darkness, perhaps in twos or threes, paying their admission at the booth, would animate the old, forgotten world. The projectionist at the camera would come alive; he’d peer into the faces for clues to the great mystery as the horizons widened and the noise and colour and perplexing heaviness of the inescapable reality of the unreal future rushed in. The knife-scored theatre seats and the daylight like a shabby velour tapestry creeping over the stillness of the watchers. Watching what?