For Conservative Movie Lovers: Buster Keaton and 'The Cameraman' Part 2

The Cameraman marks an exact crossroads in the career of Buster Keaton. It was his last genuine silent film, made after his previous three pictures (all now hailed as classics) had underperformed at the box office. Coming at the very pinnacle of his career, it represents the last chapter of his prime “Golden Age” years, and the final opportunity to see him at the very top of his game, expertly doing what he did best.

At the same time, it was his first picture made with mighty Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who in 1928 had lured him out of the independent wilderness with a lucrative contract and promises of big budgets for production, advertising, and distribution. The Hollywood studio with “more stars than there are in heaven” sought to add a genius comedian to that celestial firmament, and who better to fill that role than the guy whom critic James Agee would later credit with bringing “pure physical comedy to its greatest heights”?

Keaton initially thought that his new deal, the richest in M-G-M history up to that time, would ensure his stardom for many years to come. “This was still before the stock market crash,” he said years later in an interview. “There was money everywhere. . . I was successful, I was famous, I was free. Hell, I was sitting pretty and didn’t have enough sense to know it.”

As it turned out, the rigid assembly-line strictures of working at M-G-M (front-office approved scripts only, generic Hollywood casts and crews, no improvisation or dangerous stunts allowed) — combined with the onset of the Great Depression, the blitzkrieg adaptation of sound, his own increasing age, and the debilitating alcoholism brought on by a failed marriage — conspired to rob him of the longstanding moviemaking methods which once enabled his spontaneous brand of physical comedy to thrive. By the mid-1930s, Buster Keaton was as anachronistic and out-of-style as disco was by the mid-1980s. Reduced to taking bit parts in movies and creating gags for the new crop of comedians behind-the-scenes, it would take film critic James Agee’s 1949 essay to spark a revival in his fortunes and reputation.

But back in 1928, during his initial honeymoon phase with M-G-M, he had no way of knowing any of that. All he saw was a glorious new phase of his career stretching out before him. In the past he often swung for the fences, ever trying to top himself with more outrageous gags. But The Cameraman was, in Keaton’s words, “one of my pet pictures. It’s the simplest story that you can find, which was always a great thing for us if we could find it.” That simplicity brought out an element in his work heretofore unseen, namely a romantic sentimentality and a more languorous pace, both stemming from the emotions and humanity of the characters.

In June, Buster provided M-G-M with the idea of a lovelorn New York photographer striving to become a movie cameraman in order to impress a kindly girl working at a local newsreel company. Months later, the studio proudly presented their new star with an enormous script compiled by over twenty writers and filled with a bewildering array of clichéd characters and tired Hollywood plot-twists. After a half-hearted try at filming the behemoth in New York, Keaton called the studio and begged them to “for God’s sake, authorize me to throw this cockeyed script in the ash can and shoot from the cuff from here on.”

Freed from the strictures of a screenplay, Keaton proceeded to engage in his usual method of working: boundless creativity borne of rigorous improvisation. At one point his character arrives at Yankee Stadium to film a newsreel, finds it empty, and proceeds to charmingly engage in every fan’s fantasy: miming a game on the renowned field, playing all the positions by himself with childlike enthusiasm. In another, his efforts to break open a simple piggy bank end up destroying half his apartment. In still another, he takes an exhausted staple of romantic movies — dropping a telephone and rushing off frantically down a busy street in pursuit of a loved one — and makes it hilarious by sprinting so fast that he reaches her apartment and skids to a stop right behind her before she’s realized he’s no longer on the other end of the line. The film’s big set-piece, an explosive tong war between rival gangs in Chinatown, features him inventing ingenious ways to dodge bullets, knives, and bodies while simultaneously filming the works, all while his pet monkey tags along and takes full part in the mayhem.

Among this cavalcade of comedic delights, Keaton later revealed that, “The sequence that furnished the longest laugh in the picture was found at Venice, California, which was dressed up — or down — to look like New York’s Coney Island. Its gags were invented on the spot by [director Edward] Sedgwick, myself, and our two writers, Lew Lipton and Clyde Bruckman.” At base, the idea was simple: Keaton takes his girl to a public swimming pool for their first date. But the number of titters, yowls, belly-laughs, and boffos he manages to wring out of that scenario is extraordinary. Each new development flows organically into the next, the laughs so earthbound and genuine that it comes as a surprise to learn how much hard work and inventive genius went into them.

Take the centerpiece of the scene: Keaton attempting to change into a swimsuit before his poolside date gets snapped up by one of the many muscular college jocks prowling the area like sharks. Looking over the dressing rooms at the real-live Venice location, Buster decided that his poor character would find himself forced to share one with a much burlier fellow. To make the predicament even more funny, he had an extra-small mock-up of the real room built, one that would force the two actors to squeeze, contort, and fumble with every attempt to remove their clothes. The seasoned comedian’s eagle-eye left no detail unexamined in his quest to build the scene into a comedic gem. “Each bathhouse had six hooks on its walls,” Keaton later remembered, so “we removed four hooks, because a couple of men struggling to hang all of their clothes on one hook apiece could be very funny.”

Initially, the director suggested that a hulking actor should be found to serve as Keaton’s dressing-room nemesis, but Buster saw that as too unrealistic. “What I wanted was a fellow about my size who looked like a grouch but not the sort who dares start a fight.” With such a character mentally improvised on the spot, and no time to go back to Hollywood to hunt down an appropriate actor, they turned to the balding, scowling unit manager on his crew. “He filled the bill on looks,” Keaton decided, “although he had never done any acting. . . As usual, we did not rehearse the scene. . . rehearsed scenes look mechanical on the screen.”

By rolling the camera and inventing as they went along, they were able to create something that audiences still remember eighty years later. “The scene ran for four minutes,” Keaton later marveled in an interview, “which is a very long time on the screen for a string of gags worked by just two men in a single ridiculous situation. [M-G-M Producer Irving] Thalberg almost had hysterics when he saw that day’s rushes in a projection room.” The unit manager who had acted in the scene alongside Keaton, Ed Brophy, generated so much laughter among audiences that it propelled him into a long Hollywood career as a crowd-pleasing grouch — you can see him in The Champ (1931), Freaks (1932), The Thin Man (1934), and the musicals Varsity Show (1937) and Gold Diggers in Paris (1938) among many others (you can even hear him as the mouse in Disney’s Dumbo).

[youtube 8VUY2JFEsBs — click here to watch in full-screen]

As the famous “changing room scene” in The Cameraman shows, it wasn’t plot-twists or clever writing that drove a Keaton picture, but physical gags: spontaneous comedy derived from setting and characters, visual stuff more reminiscent of vaudeville than a theatrical play. For Buster Keaton was a product not of cinema, but of a lost stage art which cinema had destroyed decades earlier. . . .

Previous posts in the series “Buster Keaton and The Cameraman

Part 1


FURTHER READING and VIEWING

A tour of the real-life locations for The Cameraman: See some of the still-existing and recognizable Los Angeles buildings that Buster Keaton used to film The Cameraman in 1928.

TCM notes on The Cameraman: Here’s TCM’s mini-essay on the film, written by James Steffen. Just like the standard TCM video introductions by Robert Osborne, these little written exposes on their website are always interesting and worth a read.

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