On December 23, at Smithtown Public Library’s Commack location, film professor Keith Crocker hosted a lecture on the “Stonefaced Clown of Comedy,” silent film star Buster Keaton.
Crocker screened Keaton’s 1921 short film, Cops, which culminates in a frenzy of police officers pursuing the pork pie-hatted movie legend across various large-scale set-pieces. He lauded impressive stunt work the modern viewer may mistakenly label ahead-of-its-time “special effects.”
Throughout the 1920s, Keaton made his dent in the then-newborn cinematic universe in short order by pumping out one practical effect-laced and physical punchline-plenty picture after the next, prior to the “talkie” takeover and MGM’s seizure of his creative control. Few movie stars remain who still follow in Keaton’s footsteps by finding studios to insure their plunges into harm’s way.
“For me, it’s about storytelling. And I grew up watching Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton… their kind of work that they did, the classics,” Tom Cruise told Conan O’Brien in 2019. “And they made me laugh, and they had tension, so these things that I want to really build stories around, and that’s why I started producing Mission: Impossible. … I kind of put the audience in the seat of those characters.”
Martial Arts/slapstick aerobics master Jackie Chan and Jackass creator Johnny Knoxville also consider themselves students of Keaton’s school for daredevils and pratfall pioneers. Moreover, the final sequence of Cops clearly demonstrates Keaton’s influence on contemporary filmmakers, namely the Wachowskis and their The Matrix franchise.
I agree with Prof. Crocker: The General, Keaton’s 1926 feature many, including Citizen Kane director Orson Welles, call his opus, failed upon initial release due to Keaton’s typical flair for the high-stakes comedic being overshadowed by the locomotive train. Imagine Leslie Nielsen choosing to star in a frenetic-paced, mid-90s Tony Scott action/thriller instead of The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, wherein he retains his deadpan excellence but plays second banana to a fast-moving inanimate force – all while controlling every aspect of said production to boot.
In my opinion, Keaton’s masterpiece is 1924’s Sherlock Jr. He stars as a down-on-his-luck projectionist who manifests his detective aspirations by stepping into the screen of the latest movie he is projecting. He did so sixty years before Jeff Daniels would exit stage center for Woody Allen in The Purple Rose of Cairo; and deployed this rule-shattering meta energy seventy years before Arnold Schwarzenegger could do the same in the underrated self-referential satire, Last Action Hero.
Additionally, Sherlock Jr. predicted some of the most historically celebrated works released in his lifetime: The Wizard of Oz (1939) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Each hoisted the courage to portray a protagonist’s inner turmoil by reimagining figures from their own lives as fictional characters in a dream-fueled state and conveying an angelic out-of-body experience via overlapped editing techniques, respectively, because Sherlock Jr. suspended the disbelief-laid road first.
Thus, Sherlock Jr. can be argued as one of the first true genre-benders: what Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein was for Quentin Tarantino, and what Scary Movie 3 is for this essayist, Sherlock Jr. was as the dynamite behind the moving image explosion in general – and still is. Simultaneously a comedy, action, romantic drama, crime mystery and sci-fi/fantasy, it also serves as a metaphor for filmgoing itself; the process of escaping into the make-believe to bring forth a better reality by the time you step back into it after the show.
“In order to understand the cinematic genius that Buster Keaton was, one has to go no further than Sherlock Jr. – perhaps his most inventive film up to that time,” said Crocker. “Keaton uses the picture to convey his own love of cinema, and to take the audience along for the ride. It shows that Keaton was tuned in to the average moviegoer. What we see him act out in the film is our own fantasies. As Keaton the projectionist falls asleep and is able to spiritually leave his body and become one with the movie he is projecting, it represents the very same fantasy of the collective whole, and the desire of the individual to bond with the outlets they love in the manner they see fit. There is no ambiguity between Buster Keaton and his audience. For their time together, they function as one. And you can’t ask for any more from a performer.”
Keaton and his contemporaries were trailblazing vaudevillians who flocked to the medium most conducive to upholding an illusionist’s foremost credo. Top-of-the-heap tricksters no longer needed to fear the exposure of the methods to their madness thanks to the screens separating them from their audiences. Still, screens also brought the two parties closer together in more ways than one. Through this prism, we can observe even more beauty apparent within the fabric of the Sherlock Jr. narrative; it’s Keaton’s admission to the audience – both within the film, and of it.
If Hollywood makes a Buster Keaton biopic for today’s cinephile, it would only continue to remind current generations that The Cameraman director/star’s influence is empirically baked into the creative DNA of everything from the Back to the Future trilogy to the ever-growing “Spider-Verse.” He is someone whose life you could not completely capture, but the impression of which would surely have to include the time he freed himself from a rehab straitjacket with skills learned from Harry Houdini. Another scene that would demand representation, regardless of whether it happened: his finally cracking a smile upon the completion of yet another in an infinite slew of stone-faced takes, perhaps even stepping out of himself, a la his Sherlock Jr. persona, for a change.
Upon doing so, Keaton could witness himself achieve what others would rule the most impossible of stunts, mainly because they had not known the unexercised gags he’d take to the grave with him in 1966: making a movie, hell, making several, that are still immensely discussed and routinely paid homage to 100 years later.
Keith Crocker is a Long Island, NY based filmmaker and film historian. He attended the New York Institute of Technology from 1984 through 1988, where he majored in film and TV production. In 1993, Keith made his first feature film, which was based on Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue. During this time, he also worked as a motion picture projectionist. From 1987 through 2005, Keith was editor of the fanzine The Journal, which published 25 issues. In 2008, Keith released Blitzkreig, which a WWII-based film. During this time, he was also the co-founder of Wildeye Releasing. Keith has been teaching adult education at Nassau Community College for the past 20 years and has also been giving seminars on motion pictures to public libraries and community centers for the past 26 years. He lives on Long Island with his wife, Christina. He has two screenplays written for upcoming production.
To join Crocker’s presentation mailing list, contact [email protected]. Subscribers will be notified about all upcoming programming events.
For January:
Monday, January 10- 7pm (In Person) Smithtown library (Commack branch) Spaghetti Westerns
Tuesday, January 11- 6:00pm (In Person) North Babylon public library Jackie Gleason and the Honeymooners
Wednesday, January 12- 1pm (virtual) Bryant library 3-D Comin’ at ya!
Friday, January 21- 1pm (virtual) East Meadow Public Library The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas (1956) (screening)
Wednesday, January 26- 1pm (in person) Bryant library Nightmare Alley (1947) (screening)
