Film History Milestones - 1927 Event and Significance 1927 Fox released They're Coming to Get Me (1927), a five-minute black and white short that was the first 'talkie' using the Movietone system. The first feature film released using the Fox Movietone system was Sunrise (1927) , directed by F. W. Murnau -- the first professionally-produced feature film with an actual soundtrack. 1927 The effective end of the silent era of films came when Warner Brothers produced and debuted The Jazz Singer (1927) , the first widely-screened feature-length talkie or movie with dialogue. The musical, starring popular vaudevillian Al Jolson, had accompanying audio (with a sound-on-disc technology) which consisted of a few songs by Jolson and a few lines of synchronized dialogue. In his nightclub act in the film, Jolson presented the movie's first spoken ad-libbed words: "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet." The film had about 350 spontaneously ad-libbed words. 1927 Fox's Movietone newsreel, the first sound news film, was produced.

The first recording of a news event was the takeoff of Charles Lindbergh's plane from New York on May 20, 1927 on his historic flight across the Atlantic to Paris, the inspiration to create Movietone News. 1927 At the height of his career during the decade of the 20s, comedian Buster Keaton (known as "The Great Stone Face" who equally rivaled silent comic director/star Charlie Chaplin), made many short films and twelve feature films, including his timeless masterpiece The General (1927) . It is regarded as one of the greatest of all silent comedies (and Keaton's own favorite) - and undoubtedly the best train film ever made. The chase comedy based on a true Civil War incident received both poor reviews by critics (it was considered tedious and disappointing) and weak box-office results (about a half million dollars) when initially released in the late 1920s, and it led to Keaton's loss of independence as a film-maker and a restrictive deal with MGM. It would take many decades for the film to be hailed as one of the best ever made.

His distinctive films were noted for their trademark wit, satire, acrobatic agility and stunt-work, and fantasy. Other well-known works at this time included Our Hospitality (1923), The Navigator (1924), Sherlock, Jr. (1924), and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) . 1927 Director Abel Gance's celebrated epic silent film Napoleon (1927, Fr.) premiered in Paris, France, over 100 years after the military leader's death in 1821. It experimented with wide-screen and multi-screen effects, used rapid-fire editing (influenced by Eisenstein's Potemkin (1925)), free-wheeling camera movement (influenced by Murnau), and a unique multi-projector system. The final sequence was to be screened via triple projection as a triptych. It was the precursor to the wide-screen Cinerama process that debuted in 1952.

1927 Director Fritz Lang's classic dystopian vision of the future, the expressionistic Metropolis (1927, Germ) set in the year of 2000, exploited massive sets and lavish set design, clever special effects, stylistic shadowing, oblique camera angles and labryinths, and physical effects like realistic miniatures (one of their first uses) and hydraulically-produced flooding. It was considered a costly box-office disaster at the time and its notorious German producer, the UFA (Universumfilm Aktiengesellschaft) had to be bailed out by U.S. interests. Brigitte Helm served as the film's real Maria (an oppressed working girl) and as the evil robotic doppelganger of herself - cinematic history's first android or robot. 1927 The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) was founded, with 36 members (composed of actors, directors, writers, technicians, and producers). The organization's first president was Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and its first awards ceremony was held in 1929, to honor films in 1927 and 1928.

1927 Motion picture film became standardized at 24 fps. 1927 The prison comedy silent film The Second Hundred Years (1927) marked the official debut of "Stan" Laurel and "Ollie" Hardy as a comedy duo, although they had previously worked together for about 10 years. It was the first of Hal Roach's comedy series that paired and featured the two as a formal screen team. 1927 British director Alfred Hitchcock released his third film, the suspense film The Lodger (1927) (aka The Lodger: A Story of The London Fog), a tale about an "Avenger" based upon the Jack the Ripper serial killings. Hitchcock's first credited and completed feature film The Pleasure Garden (1925, UK) was released in the US in 1926, but delayed for release in the UK until 1927 following The Lodger's success. The film was notable as being Hitchcock's first 'true' film (his first suspense film), his earliest film that survived in its entirety, and the first with a trademark cameo appearance .

1927 The Hays Office issued a Production Code memorandum, "Don'ts and Be Carefuls," a code of decency telling the studios eleven taboos or things to avoid in the "Don'ts" section (and twenty-six items in the "Be Carefuls" section), including profanity, 'licentious or suggestive nudity,' illegal traffic in drugs, any inference of sex perversion, white slavery, miscegenation, sex hygiene and venereal diseases, scenes of actual childbirth, children's sex organs, ridicule of the clergy, and willful offense to any nation, race or creed. 1927 Grauman's Chinese Theater opened in Hollywood, California (on Hollywood Boulevard), with the premiere of Cecil B. DeMille's King of Kings (1927). It soon became famed for hand and footprints of various film stars and celebrities. The first stars to leave their imprints in the concrete were: Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. (April 30), Norma Talmadge (May 18), Norma Shearer (August 1), Harold Lloyd (November 21), and William S. Hart (November 28).

1927 MGM's mystery-horror film London After Midnight (1927), a "lost film," was director Tod Browning's first Hollywood vampire film, with star Lon Chaney ("the man of a thousand faces") in the role of Professor Edward C. Burke of Scotland Yard - a sunken and dark-eyed vampirish character. (The film existed until 1967, but then was destroyed in a massive MGM vault fire in 1967.) The silent film was one of the first horror films directed by Tod Browning, four years before his vampire classic Dracula (1931) , starring Bela Lugosi. It was notable for being one of Chaney's last feature films before his death in 1930. Chaney and Browning had collaborated together on ten feature films over a decade. Chaney became the first American horror-film star and Hollywood's first great character actor. London After Midnight made an estimated $721,000 from a production budget of $152,000 - the highest-grossing film from Browning and Chaney.

If Chaney had not died early at the age of 47 of throat cancer, he would have been Tod Browning's first choice to play the lead role in his 1931 Dracula film, replacing Bela Lugosi. In the early 2000s, on the 75th anniversary of the film, an attempt at a restoration of the film (created from 200 stills and the film's script), with a duration of 45 minutes, was aired on the Turner Classic Movie channel. 1927 In 1927, the average cost of a movie ticket was 25 cents. 1927 All-American half-back football star Johnny Mack Brown, a future star of B-westerns for over two decades, signed a contract with MGM, thereby becoming the first sports star to sustain a career in motion pictures. 1927 Director Victor Fleming's The Way of All Flesh (1927), a presumed "lost film," starred Best Actor-winning Emil Jannings (a German movie actor) as an early 1900s Milwaukee bank clerk named August Shilling.

After the happily-married family man was robbed during a Chicago bank business trip, when he was seduced by a flirtatious blonde (Phyllis Haver) and her hired goon, he was left for dead. The mangled corpse of the crooked saloon owner, her accomplice who was hit by a train, was mis-identified as Schilling, and he was regarded as a dead hero who perished while defending himself. For years, the shamed, memory-suffering Schiller, now a ruined, aging and homeless derelict, was doomed to hide out from his family for 20 years. During the first Academy Awards ceremony, Jannings was awarded the first-ever Best Actor Award, for a film that was the only winning film in Academy history to be missing or lost. Jannings also won Best Actor for a second film: The Last Command (1928). The two films were his first two American film performances. He received his Best Actor award early - due to the fact that he was going home to Europe before the ceremony - making him the first no-show winner. However, it didn't much matter - the category's winners had been announced three months before the ceremony took place anyway.

1927 Paramount's film titled It (1927) opened, with an early appearance by Gary Cooper and 22 year-old starlet Clara Bow as resourceful lingerie department store salesgirl Betty Lou Spence who fell for her boss (Cyrus Waltham Jr.) - she soon became known as the "It Girl." "IT" meant unashamed sex appeal, hedonism and liberation. Bow - a saucy working class girl from Brooklyn, who had struck it big as a silent film actress, had already been dubbed "The Brooklyn Bonfire" and "The Hottest Jazz Baby in Films." One of her most memorable lines in the film was: "So you're one of those Minute Men - the minute you meet a girl you think you can kiss her!" The film was also noted as having the earliest known use of a zoom lens in a US feature film, in its opening shot. 1927 Leo the Lion, the famed African lion mascot of Hollywood's MGM film studio, was flown as a transcontinental publicity stunt non-stop from Southern California (near San Diego) to New York, in a plane similar to Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St.

Louis which had made its historic flight across the Atlantic a few months earlier. The plane crashed in Arizona near the town of Gisela, in a Tonto National Forest canyon. Six days following the crash, after the pilot went for help, the still-caged Leo was rescued from the plane's wreckage - alive and well, but hungry and thirsty. The mascot was shipped back to Los Angeles by truck. The General Movie Review & Film Summary (1927) | Roger Ebert Tweet Buster Keaton was not the Great Stone Face so much as a man who kept his composure in the center of chaos. Other silent actors might mug to get a point across, but Keaton remained observant and collected. That's one reason his best movies have aged better than those of his rival, Charlie Chaplin . He seems like a modern visitor to the world of the silent clowns. Advertisement Consider an opening sequence in "The General” (1927), his masterpiece about a Southern railway engineer who has "only two loves in his life” -- his locomotive and the beautiful Annabelle Lee. Early in the film, Keaton, dressed in his Sunday best, walks to his girl's house.

He is unaware that two small boys are following him, marching in lockstep--and that following them is Annabelle Lee herself ( Marion Mack ). He arrives at her door. She watches unobserved. He polishes his shoes on the backs of his pants legs, and then knocks, pauses, looks about, and sees her standing right behind him. This moment would have inspired an overacted double-take from many other silent comedians. Keaton plays it with his face registering merely heightened interest. They go inside. He sits next to her on the sofa. He becomes aware that the boys have followed them in. His face reflects slight unhappiness. He rises, puts on his hat as if to leave and opens the door, displaying such courtesy you would think the boys were his guests. The boys walk out and he closes the door on them. Advertisement He is not a man playing for laughs, but a man absorbed in a call on the most important person in his life. That's why it's funny. That's also why the movie's most famous shot works--the one where, rejected by his girl, he sits disconsolately on the drive-rod of the big engine.

As it begins to move, it lifts him up and down, but he does not notice, because he thinks only of Annabelle Lee. This series of shots establishes his character as a man who takes himself seriously, and that is the note he will sound all through the film. We don't laugh at Keaton, but identify with him. "The General” is an epic of silent comedy, one of the most expensive films of its time, including an accurate historical recreation of a Civil War episode, hundreds of extras, dangerous stunt sequences, and an actual locomotive falling from a burning bridge into a gorge far below. It was inspired by a real event; the screenplay was based on the book "The Great Locomotive Chase,” written by William Pittenger, the engineer who was involved. Advertisement As the film opens, war has been declared and Johnny Gray (Keaton) has been turned down by a rebel enlisting officer (he is more valuable as an engineer, although nobody explains that to him). “I don't want you to speak to me again until you are in uniform,” Annabelle declares. Time passes. Johnny is the engineer of the General, a Southern locomotive.

The train is stolen by Union spies, and Johnny chases it on foot, by sidecar, by bicycle and finally with another locomotive, the Texas. Then the two sides switch trains, and the chase continues in reverse. Annabelle was a passenger on the stolen train, becomes a prisoner of the Union troops, is rescued by Johnny and rides with him during the climactic chase scenes that end with the famous shot of the Texas falling into the gorge (where, it is said, its rusted hulk remains to this day). It would seem logically difficult to have much of a chase involving trains, since they must remain on tracks, and so one must forever be behind the other one--right? Keaton defies logic with one ingenious silent comic sequence after another, and it is important to note that he never used a double and did all of his own stunts, even very dangerous ones, with a calm acrobatic grace. The train's obvious limitations provide him with ideas. An entire Southern retreat and Northern advance take place unnoticed behind him, while he chops wood. Two sight gags involve his puzzlement when rail cars he thought were behind him somehow reappear in front of him.

He sets up the locations along the way, so that he can exploit them differently on the way back. One famous sequence involves a cannon on a flat car, which Keaton wants to fire at the other train. He lights the fuse and runs back to the locomotive, only to see that the cannon has slowly reversed itself and is now pointed straight at him. Advertisement One inspiration builds into another: To shield himself from the cannonball, he runs forward and sits on the cowcatcher of the speeding Texas, with no one at the controls and a big railroad tie in his arms. The Union men throw another tie onto the tracks, and Keaton, with perfect aim and timing, knocks the second off by throwing the first. It's flawless and perfect, but consider how risky it is to sit on the front of a locomotive hoping one tie will knock another out of the way without either one smashing your brains out. Between chase scenes, he blunders into a house where the Northern generals are planning their strategy, and rescues Annabelle Lee--but not before Keaton creates a perfect little cinematic joke. He is hiding under the dining table as the Northerners confer. One of them burns a hole in the tablecloth with his cigar.

Annabelle Lee is brought into the room, and we see Keaton's eye peering through the hole--and then there's a reverse shot of the girl, with Keaton using the hole in the cloth to create a “found” iris shot--one of those shots so beloved of Griffith, in which a circle is drawn around a key element on the screen. Advertisement “The General” was voted one of the 10 greatest films of all time in the authoritative Sight & Sound poll. Who knows if it is even Keaton's greatest? Others might choose “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” (1928). His other classics include “Our Hospitality” (1923), “The Navigator” (1924), “Go West” (1925) and “The Cameraman” (1928), in which he played a would-be newsreel photographer who lucks into his career. Born in 1897, the same year as the cinema, he grew up in a vaudeville family. As part of the act, he was literally thrown around the stage; like W.C. Fields, he learned his physical skills in a painful childhood apprenticeship.

He started in films with Fatty Arbuckle in 1917 and directed his first shorts in 1920. In less than a decade, from 1920 to 1928, he created a body of work that stands beside Chaplin's (some would say above it), and he did it with fewer resources because he was never as popular or well-funded as the Little Tramp. Then the talkies came in, he made an ill-advised deal with MGM that ended his artistic independence, and the rest of his life was a long second act--so long that in the 1940s he was reduced to doing a live half-hour TV show in Los Angeles. But it was also long enough that his genius was rediscovered, and he made a crucial late work, Samuel Beckett's “Film” (1965), and was hailed with a retrospective at Venice shortly before his death in 1966. Advertisement Today I look at Keaton's works more often than any other silent films. They have such a graceful perfection, such a meshing of story, character and episode, that they unfold like music.

Although they're filled with gags, you can rarely catch Keaton writing a scene around a gag; instead, the laughs emerge from the situation; he was “the still, small, suffering center of the hysteria of slapstick,” wrote the critic Karen Jaehne. And in an age when special effects were in their infancy, and a “stunt” often meant actually doing on the screen what you appeared to be doing, Keaton was ambitious and fearless. He had a house collapse around him. He swung over a waterfall to rescue a woman he loved. He fell from trains. And always he did it in character, playing a solemn and thoughtful man who trusts in his own ingenuity. “Charlie's tramp was a bum with a bum's philosophy,” he once said. “Lovable as he was, he would steal if he got the chance. My little fellow was a workingman, and honest.” That describes his characters, and it reflects their creator. Popular Blog Posts The General (1926) - IMDb IMDb Debbie Reynolds’ Last Words: ‘I Want to Be with Carrie,’ Son Says 20 hours ago There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property.

Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error When Union spies steal an engineer's beloved locomotive, he pursues it single-handedly and straight through enemy lines. Directors: a list of 25 titles created 18 Jun 2011 a list of 33 titles created 05 Aug 2012 a list of 33 titles created 29 Aug 2013 a list of 27 titles created 30 Apr 2014 a list of 33 titles created 17 Feb 2015 Search for " The General " on Amazon.com Connect with IMDb Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. 2 wins & 1 nomination. See more awards » Photos A film projectionist longs to be a detective, and puts his meagre skills to work when he is framed by a rival for stealing his girlfriend's father's pocketwatch.

Director: Buster Keaton A married farmer falls under the spell of a slatternly woman from the city, who tries to convince him to drown his wife. Director: F.W. Murnau A man learns he will inherit a fortune if he marries. By 7 p.m. Today. Director: Buster Keaton With the aid of a wealthy erratic tippler, a dewy-eyed tramp who has fallen in love with a sightless flower girl accumulates money to be able to help her medically. Director: Charles Chaplin A chronicle of the trial of Jeanne d'Arc on charges of heresy, and the efforts of her ecclesiastical jurists to force Jeanne to recant her claims of holy visions. Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer When the police in a German city are unable to catch a child-murderer, other criminals join in the manhunt. Director: Fritz Lang A man returns to his Appalachian homestead. On the trip, he falls for a young woman. The only problem is her family has vowed to kill every member of his family. Directors: John G.

Blystone, Buster Keaton Stars: Buster Keaton, Natalie Talmadge, Joe Keaton In a futuristic city sharply divided between the working class and the city planners, the son of the city's mastermind falls in love with a working class prophet who predicts the coming of a savior to mediate their differences. Director: Fritz Lang After living a life marked by coldness, an aging professor is forced to confront the emptiness of his existence. Director: Ingmar Bergman Two spoiled rich people find themselves trapped on an empty passenger ship. Directors: Donald Crisp, Buster Keaton Stars: Buster Keaton, Kathryn McGuire, Frederick Vroom A spoiled heiress running away from her family is helped by a man who is actually a reporter in need of a story. Director: Frank Capra A poor Midwest family is forced off of their land. They travel to California, suffering the misfortunes of the homeless in the Great Depression. Director: John Ford Edit Storyline Johnnie loves his train ("The General") and Annabelle Lee. When the Civil War begins he is turned down for service because he's more valuable as an engineer. Annabelle thinks it's because he's a coward.

Union spies capture The General with Annabelle on board. Johnnie must rescue both his loves. Written by Ed Stephan <stephan@cc.wwu.edu> Love, Locomotives and Laughs See more » Genres: 24 February 1927 (France) See more » Also Known As: Did You Know? Trivia The film's hard-edged look was inspired by the battlefield photographs of Matthew Brady, which captured the carnage of the Civil War in shocking detail. See more » Goofs Annabelle gets drenched when she and Johnnie stop for water, but as they return to the engine, her dress is dry. See more » Quotes Annabelle's brother : Fort Sumter has been fired upon. Mr. Lee : Then the war is here. Annabelle's brother : Yes, dad, and I'm going to be one of the first to enlist.

User Reviews Richly inventive comedy with a logically impeccable plot that makes the hyperbolic slapstick seem plausible and inevitable; this is a work of art and a work of genius (United States) – See all my reviews Buster Keaton's "The General," about a man and his engine, puts you in a world where the most comically inventive situation that could happen will happen. From major comic situations to throwaway gags, "The General" always knows what to do. The story begins in leisurely fashion. A title card tells us that Johnnie Gray (Keaton) has two loves in his life: his engine and his girlrespectively, The General and Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack). Johnnie goes to visit Annabelle, followed by two engineer-worshipping boys and, unknown to him, Annabelle Lee herself. He and his entourage arrive at the door; Johnnie polishes his shoes on the back of his pants legs, slicks back his hair, and gently taps the door with the door knocker. Then he turns to notice Annabelle. Keaton's understated reaction is a testament to his uniqueness. Any other comedian would have done an explosive double-take.

Now Johnnie and Annabelle are together in her parlor, but the boys are there, too. Johnnie stands up, puts on his hat and opens the door as if to leave. The hero-worshippers are ready to follow, but Johnnie lets them out first, then closes the door on them. This is a gentle ruse in the world of silent comedy. At Keystone both boys would have gotten kicked in the pants. Now the two are alone. Annabelle's father sees them from another room and is about to break things up when her brother enters and announces that Fort Sumter has been fired upon: the War Between the States has begun. Annabelle kisses her father and brother as they go to enlist, then turns expectantly to Johnnie, who cocks his head like a confused puppy. She asks, "Aren't you going to enlist?" Realization hits him, and he leaps off the seat. Before he can run out the door, Annabelle kisses him. This so overwhelms Johnnie that he flings out his arm in a farewell gesture and falls off the porch. Johnnie races to the general store, which is now a makeshift recruitment office. Taking a shortcut he manages to be the first in line.

The door to the office is opened and Johnnie comes marching inonly he and the rest of the line go in two different directions, and he has to jump over several tables to get in front again. He gives the enlistment officer his name and occupation, but the man rejects him. Johnnie is more valuable to the South as an engineer. Later, Annabelle believes that Johnnie didn't even try to enlist. She refuses to speak to him again until he's in uniform. What follows is a classic moment: Johnnie sits on the connecting rod of his engine. He's so miserable that he doesn't notice when he starts moving up and down, until just before the train enters a tunnel. Time passes and we learn that a group of Unionists are secretly passengers on The General. When (nearly) everyone is off the train having dinner, the Unionists climb back aboard and take the engine. Annabelle, a passenger herself, was still on board. She is now their prisoner. But Johnnie only knows his beloved General has been stolen, possibly by deserters. He pursues the engine by taking another, The Texas.

Through a mishap he becomes the sole person aboard The Texas, but the Unionists think they're outnumbered and continue to run. What follows is the true joy of the movie: two long chases (separated by an important plot twist). Now the movie changes its quiet pace for almost nonstop action. I love it when the Unionists break off the rail car to hinder The Texas. At one point, the car, which Johnnie thought he had switched to another track, reappears in front of the baffled engineer, only to disappear later just as mysteriously. We see the logical circumstances that lead to the car's seeming magic act, and the equally logical situations that keep Keaton occupied, preventing him from seeing what we see. Comic logic is important to "The General." In no other movie do hyperbolic slapstick gags seem so plausible and inevitable. In a throwaway gag, Johnnie empties a burlap sack full of shoes because he urgently needs the sack. Of courseof course!he loses his own shoe in the pile and must stop to hunt for it. We move to the second chase, where Johnnie has The General and the Unionists are the ones pursuing him.

Now Johnnie must contend with Annabelle Lee. Marion Mack leaves no mark of her personality on the screen. She deserves credit mainly for being willing and able to take it. Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn were never thrown around, trod upon or knocked about the way Marion Mack was. She has hilarious moments. The excitement of the chase does not prevent her from taking out a broom to sweep the dusty floor of the engine. An exasperated Johnnie tells her to keep throwing wood into the fire. She takes a small stick and daintily puts it in. Johnnie sarcastically hands her a sliver, and she puts that in, too. Then, in a moment that has an audience roaring and clapping, Johnnie grabs her and half-throttles her before kissing her instead. The final section, most of it a battle scene, includes the shot where The Texas begins to cross a burning bridge, only to crash into the river. Owing to Keaton's disdain of fakery (one of several reasons his works seem modern) he did not use a model but a real train on a real burning bridge.

The crash cost $42,000reportedly making it the single most expensive shot ever in a silent film. A worthy closing gag was too taxing even for Keaton's ingenuity. Johnnie's dilemma is to kiss his girl while saluting the passing soldiers. His remedy is only mildly funny. Is anyone complaining? "The General" is a work of art and a work of genius. 58 of 75 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes The Films of Buster Keaton Movie Review () | Roger Ebert Tweet The greatest of the silent clowns is Buster Keaton , not only because of what he did, but because of how he did it. Harold Lloyd made us laugh as much, Charlie Chaplin moved us more deeply, but no one had more courage than Buster. I define courage as Hemingway did: "Grace under pressure." In films that combined comedy with extraordinary physical risks, Buster Keaton played a brave spirit who took the universe on its own terms, and gave no quarter. Advertisement I'm immersed in his career right now, viewing all of the silent features and many of the shorts with students at the University of Chicago.

Having already written about Keaton's " The General " (1927) in this series, I thought to choose another title. "The Navigator," perhaps, or "Steamboat Bill, Jr.," or "Our Hospitality." But they are all of a piece; in an extraordinary period from 1920 to 1929, he worked without interruption on a series of films that make him, arguably, the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies. Most of these movies were long thought to be lost. "The General," with Buster as a train engineer in the Civil War, was always available, hailed as one of the supreme masterpieces of silent filmmaking. But other features and shorts existed in shabby, incomplete prints, if at all, and it was only in the 1960s that film historians began to assemble and restore Keaton's lifework. Now almost everything has been recovered, restored, and is available on DVDs and tapes that range from watchable to sparkling. It's said that Chaplin wanted you to like him, but Keaton didn't care. I think he cared, but was too proud to ask.

His films avoid the pathos and sentiment of the Chaplin pictures, and usually feature a jaunty young man who sees an objective and goes after it in the face of the most daunting obstacles. Buster survives tornadoes, waterfalls, avalanches of boulders and falls from great heights, and never pauses to take a bow: He has his eye on his goal. And his movies, seen as a group, are like a sustained act of optimism in the face of adversity; surprising how, without asking, he earns our admiration and tenderness. Advertisement Because he was funny, because he wore that porkpie hat, Keaton's physical skills are often undervalued. We hear about the stunts of Douglas Fairbanks Sr., but no silent star did more dangerous stunts than Buster Keaton. Instead of using doubles, he himself doubled for some of his actors, doing their stunts as well as his own. He said he learned to "take a fall" as a child, when he toured in vaudeville with his parents, Joe and Myra.

By the time he was 3, he was being thrown around the stage and into the orchestra pit, and his little suits even had a handle concealed at the waist, so Joe could sling him like luggage. Today this would be child abuse; then it was showbiz. "It was the roughest knockabout act that was ever in the history of the theater," Keaton told the historian Kevin Brownlow. He claimed that Harry Houdini dubbed him " Buster " because of those falls; Houdini was a friend, but the nickname came before the Keatons met him. Buster and Joe discovered that when he was hurled through the bass drum and emerged waving and smiling, the audience didn't see the joke in treating a kid that way. But when Buster emerged with a solemn expression on his face, for some reason the audience loved it. For the rest of his career, Keaton was "the great stone face," with an expression that ranged from the impassive to the slightly quizzical. Advertisement He falls and falls and falls in his movies: From second-story windows, cliffs, trees, trains, motorcycles, balconies. The falls are usually not faked: He lands, gets up, keep going.

He was one of the most gifted stuntmen in the movies. Even when there is fakery, the result is daring; in "Go West" he seems to fall from a high suspension bridge, but actually falls only 50 feet or so before landing in a net; there's a cut to another shot showing him falling the last 20 feet. Both halves of this "faked" stunt are dangerous. And in "Our Hospitality," where he was almost killed when a safety wire snapped and he was swept toward a waterfall, he finished the sequence with a fake waterfall--but even it was 25 feet high, and he's swinging above a nasty fall. Keaton is famous for a shot in "Steamboat Bill, Jr.," where he stands in front of a house during a cyclone, and a wall falls on top of him; he is saved because he happens to be exactly where the window is. There was scant clearance on either side, and you can see his shoulders tighten a little just as the wall lands. He refused to rehearse the stunt because, he explained, he trusted his set-up, so why waste a wall? In film after film, Keaton does difficult and dangerous things and keeps the poker face.

His philosophy is embodied in his body language: The world throws its worst at him, but he is plucky and determined, ingenious and stubborn, and will do his best. Walter Kerr, in his definitive book "The Silent Clowns," writes of Keaton's "stillness of emotion as well as body, a universal stillness that comes of things functioining well, of having achieved harmony." When Harold Lloyd dangled from a clock face far above the street, he intended to terrify his audience. When Keaton sat on the front of a moving locomotive in "The General" and attempted to knock one railroad tie off the tracks with another, he could have been crushed beneath the train, but he presents the action as a strategy, not a stunt. Advertisement Kerr talks of the "Keaton Curve," the way an action ends up where it began. There's a shot in the early short " Neighbors " where Keaton escapes a house via a clothesline, swings safely across to his own house--then finds that the clothesline keeps rotating, depositing him right back in trouble.

In "The General," there are innumerable examples of the Curve, for example a scene where the train goes around a bend so that a cannon now points at Buster instead of the enemy. You can also see the Curve in many of those scenes where he invents ingenious "labor-saving" devices--to serve breaskfast, for example. One of his funniest shorts is "The Scarecrow," which includes a house where everything--table, bed, stove--has more than one function, so that a meal consists of a tour through the parabola of the house's gadgets. Another of Keaton's strategies was to avoid anticipation. Instead of showing you what was about to happen, he showed you what was happening; the surprise and the response are both unexpected, and funnier. He also gets laughs by the application of perfect logic. In "Our Hospitality," he discovers he is in the house of a family sworn to kill him. But Southern Hospitality insists they cannot shoot a visitor in their own house. So Buster invites himself to spend the night. In the last decade of silent film, Keaton worked as an independent auteur.

He usually used the same crew, worked with trusted riggers who understood his thinking, conceived his screenplays mostly by himself. He had backing from the mogol Joe Schenck (they were brothers-in-law, both married to Talmadge girls), but Schenck sometimes missed the point. He was outraged that Buster spent $25,000 to buy the ship used in "The Navigator," but then. without consulting Keaton, spent $25,000 to buy the rights to a third-rate Broadway farce that Buster somehow transformed into "Seven Chances." Advertisement Like Chaplin and Lloyd, he was a perfectionist who would reshoot sequences until the laughs worked, would take as long as necessary on a single shot, would supervise every element of his films. No filmmaker has ever had a better run of genius than Keaton during that decade. But then talkies came in, and he made "the biggest mistake of my life," signing on with MGM for a series of sound comedies that mostly made money, but were not under his personal control. He didn't like them.

By the late 1930s, Buster Keaton (1895-1966) was out of business as a self-starting auteur. He continued to work all his life, doing innumerable TV appearances and turning up in movies like Chaplin's " Limelight ," Wilder's " Sunset Boulevard " and even "Film," an original screenplay by Samuel Beckett. He lived in the San Fernando Valley, raised chickens, and thought his work had been forgotten. Then came a 1962 retrospective at the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris, and a tribute at the 1965 Venice Film Festival. He was relieved to see that his films were not after all lost, but observed, no doubt with a stone face, "The applause is nice, but too late." Popular Blog Posts

Question: The 1927 movie The General starred which actor?
Answer: Buster Keaton