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The Buster Keaton Chronicles
6-DVD set
‘Luck’ is one of those odd words, like ‘cleave’, that means the opposite of itself. When footballers try to appease it with charms and gamblers hope it will turn, it is a quasi-mystical force controlling our destinies. And yet it is also the blind, meaningless accident of whatever happens to happen in the absence of any such destiny. When someone says they don’t believe in luck, it helps to know which kind.
In one of the most wonderful scenes in all comic cinema, the climax of Sherlock Jr., Keaton’s sleuth makes his getaway by sitting on the handlebars of his sidekick’s motorbike. The sidekick falls off, but our hero doesn’t notice, and the one-man chase scene continues for several minutes, as Keaton somehow rides the bike through busy streets and roadworks on to a climax involving two lorries and a collapsing bridge which can get applause in a cinema 40 years after the man’s death.
The scene is typical of Keaton at his best, combining bellylaughs with absolute awe. It is equally typical in depicting a man borne along by events outside his control, entirely at the mercy of luck - in this case pretty good luck.
Slapstick does not have a very good name these days. If sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, then slapstick is the lowest form of comedy, all custard pies and banana skins, people hitting each other and falling over. But Keaton’s physical comedy is vastly more than that. It is inventive, witty, exciting and amazingly skilful. As a visual spectacle, this chase scene rivals anything in The Lord of the Rings or King Kong, precisely because you know you’re seeing a human being in action. It’s a kind of intimacy that computer technology can get in the way of.
His visual tricks can play with your expectations just as cleverly as verbal ones. In the wonderful short One Week, which this collection opens with, Buster and his wife are dragging their new house across a railroad track (it’s a long story). It gets stuck and there’s a train coming in the distance. They struggle to pull it out of the way, and give up, only for the train to pass by on a parallel track. Just as we’re breathing a sigh of relief, a train comes the opposite way and crashes right through it.
In this incident too, all our man has done to contribute to this fate is to get married. Everything else was luck, in this case rather bad. Sitting on the handlebars of a driverless bike is the perfect image for this view of life, but there are plenty of others. He’s stuck on a crewless ship cast adrift at sea, or on the cattlecatcher of a train he’s supposed to be driving. Dejected by his failure to enlist in the army (and thereby keep his girl), he sits on the wheel bar of a train, which then lifts him up and down as the train starts up and disappears into a tunnel. In Hard Luck (an unfortunate omission from this collection), he is driven to suicide, but cannot get enough control of events to succeed; in the end it is an accident that turns things around for him.
Much of this is staple to slapstick - everyman gets drawn into unusual events, has lots of accidents. But it goes deeper with Keaton. Chaplin could be something of a trickster or a rebel; even in Modern Life, which is about being a mere cog in the industrial machine, you do not get the same sense of being borne on the tide. Laurel and Hardy were always looking out for new opportunities; Harold Lloyd was positively thrusting. Keaton is just someone that things happen to.
This passivity is heightened by his celebrated impassivity. ‘Old Stoneface’ is a stoic. Why rage against the sea of fate, or delight in it, when the next wave might change everything? The Navigator (1924) suggests a social dimension to this outlook. ‘Our story deals with one of those queer tricks that fate sometimes plays,’ we are told. ‘Nobody would believe that the entire lives of a peaceful American boy and girl could be changed by a funny little war between two small countries far across the sea’. Perhaps part of Keaton’s appeal was to an isolationist US, who, like him, wanted to do their jobs, get the girl and perhaps play a round of golf, but couldn’t help getting drawn into world wars. Well, thank God they did, second time, but you can’t help feeling notalgic for such reclusion today.
I was brought up not to use the word ‘luck’ because God is in control of everything. But Keaton’s chaotic view of life is no less biblical than the book of Ecclesiastes: ‘The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favour to the skilful; but time and chance happen to them all.’ (Ecclesiastes 9:11 RSV) Keaton’s answer to his predicament, is not to put too much store in whatever luck happens to have thrown up, but it is also to transfigure the chaos of life into something precious through laughter. And you don’t need a Bible verse to see that that balancing act, for those who can manage it, is a good idea.
the scene is typical
of Keaton at his best,
combining bellylaughs
with absolute awe