The Great Buster

An excellent overview of Buster Keaton's life and work. The man was such a genius and seeing this touching documentary made me smile. I liked seeing all the miscellany and smaller things he did in his later life, even the commercials, because I had never seen them before. I also liked getting a little excerpt out of so many of the early two-reelers, and of course those extraordinary moments from his major works. I'm not sure about all the choices Bogdanovich made in terms of the celebrity interviews and would have preferred a little more depth in places that didn't get it, but it does show the scope of the influence Keaton had. In the end I appreciated the balance in the documentary, between all of the little clips and rare bits (running the risk of turning attention away from the major films) and the truly amazing physical comedy in those epic moments (running the risk of just becoming just a montage of film clips). It's not perfect, but I saw and learned new things, and was touched and inspired afterwards.

A 2018 documentary on one of the kings of silent film Buster Keaton directed & narrated by the late, great Peter Bogdanovich. Most people will say Charlie Chaplin others my say Harold Lloyd but in many circles the undisputed silent film champ is Keaton. Tracing his roots as a vaudevillian who was the child in a family act, he soon gained the eye of Fatty Arbuckle who gave him a chance to make shorts w/his studio which afforded him to make feature length productions gaining him worldwide fame & notoriety but as bad follows good, things turn when he became a contract player for MGM. Never having owned his material didn't give Keaton the cache that Chaplin would command so his inventiveness (he was a consummate tinkerer figuring out his gags in advance) were relegated to the sidelines as his talent was further wasted when talkies took over. Happily he found appreciative fans overseas in Europe where he would be feted for his past triumphs & although later in life during the 1960's, dying from cancer he'd continue to work (appearing in some of the Beach Blanket films & tons of ads promoting different products but really a return to form as they were essentially the same kind of shorts he perfected some 40 years before). W/talking heads as varied as Richard Lewis, Dick Van Dyke, Mel Brooks, Werner Herzog, Johnny Knoxville, Bill Hader & former Pathmark shill James Karen to name a bunch, we're giving an unsung cinematic hero his due. My only complaint is the film finishes about 90 minutes in but Bogdanovich tacks on another half hour to illustrate his greatness w/a collection of his most famous sequences making this portion of the doc almost an afterthought but ultimately servicable.

If you are not familiar with Buster Keaton, I guess this is not a bad place to start. However, unlike it's subject matter, this documentary is quite mediocre. In this age of great documentaries, this one still starts and ends in a traditional way - by starting with Buster's birth, career, etc. Even structurally, the docu is not well thought-out, suddenly showing a greatest-hits type compilation at the end, after having finished Buster's life story with his death. It has nothing new to add or show, except a few talking heads on what Buster meant to them. Most of these had either no connection to Buster, or they are not appropriate people to speak to (I mean, do you really care what Johnny Knoxville thinks of Buster Keaton?) It's a pretty lazy piece of film-making that is also not very well-researched.If you can, try to catch the three-part 1987 British docu called "Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow".

While maybe not the most definitive look at the man, this does a great job of explaining why and showing why he was so great and will leave you wanting to track down all of his movies you can. IF you've seen lots already and already love him, it's not really much new, unless you really wanted to know what Johnny Knoxville thinks... That said, Keaton was amazing so this is well worth watching.

I became aware of Buster Keaton in the early 1970s, when THE GENERAL played on PBS, and I bought and read his ghost-written MY WONDERFUL WORLD OF SLAPSTICK. Those were the days when all we had were memoirs with a few stills. Now, almost half a century later, almost all of Buster's work is available if you want to see it and are willing to pay a bit extra for stuff that's out of print. Yet Peter Bogdanovich's documentary tells the same story now. albeit with some clips from the 1960s, and kind words from Quentin Tarrantino and Bill Hader: can't get the young kids in unless there's someone they've heard of.

I understand that. We want people to give Buster a try, and centenarian Norman Lloyd talking about being on the set when Chaplin and Keaton were working together won't do it. Also, the story as offered is a wonderful, simple one that offers a beautiful narrative: great artist makes fatal mistake, then struggles back thanks to the love of a good woman. Yet, once you delve deeper into Keaton's films and his life, it quickly becomes far more complicated than that. So what you are left with are the clips of Buster's stunts.

And what stunts they are! People may argue endlessly about who the greatest slapstick pratfaller was, but no one will ever dispute that Keaton was among the best, and because of that, he created grand gag sequences that no one but Jackie Chan has ever come close to equaling. So if you don't know Keaton, beware. The story, like all finite stories, is hopelessly simplistic and at times false -- Keaton had a lot more control over his Educational shorts than this movie would have you believe, for one -- but take a look at it anyway, for the many clips and short sequences. Because the things this movie gets right is that Buster was one of the greatest film makers of the 1920s, and a daring and enormously effective comedian and actor.