In February, silent movie star and director Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton IV will have been dead for 50 years. A couple of weeks ago, scholars and comedy fans from as far away as France and the United Kingdom flocked to the 750-seat Bowlus Fine Arts and Cultural Center in Iola, Kan., to celebrate the legacy of the "Great Stone Face."
Keaton earned the nickname because his expression changed only slightly, no matter how chaotic the world in his movies became. He's also known for his technical innovations (nine Keatons dance together in The Play House, thanks to multiple exposures) and his jaw-dropping stunts (he literally broke his neck on camera during the making of Sherlock Jr.).
One person who's ideally suited to explain Keaton's unique appeal is University of Arkansas communications department professor Frank Scheide. He has co-edited books on Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator and Limelight (in which Keaton appears) and has contributed material to the Criterion Collection edition of the former. He has also attended and spoken at every Buster Keaton Celebration in Iola since 1994.
When asked why he and others continually make the annual trip to Iola (in his case, 187 miles), which is seven miles from Keaton's birthplace in Piqua, Scheide, speaking from his office in Fayetteville, says, "There is still something very fresh about him. He was such a unique talent. He was his own person. He has this aspect of pragmatism where there are unusual situations where he comes up with these incredible ways to deal with problems.
"He worked with the best and state-of-the-art people, whom he worked with and respected him. In Sherlock Jr., it's more than just a parody of the movies. It was just incredible what they were able to come up with. He had these like minds working with him. As a group, they came up with incredible motion pictures for the time, and they've held their own throughout the decades."
That's especially true for Keaton's stunts, which no insurance company today would allow. Scheide says, "It would kill you. Only Jackie Chan has come close to trying to duplicate some of those incredible stunts."
No Brotherly Love with Marxes
This year's Celebration included films from both Keaton and the Marx Brothers. During a downturn in his career during the 1930s, Keaton wrote gags for the siblings' MGM films like A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races. Scheide says it was not a match made in heaven.
"First of all, the fact that Keaton was a gag man at MGM rather than making films as a headliner himself was a tragic aspect of Keaton's life and career at that point," he says. "He was such a great artist, and circumstances put him in a situation where he is one of the crew rather than the star. Keaton was a professional, so he was able to do with that, but what bothered him about the Marx Brothers and some of the other people that he worked with was that they weren't as dedicated in the same way that he was. When he was doing his films, he was totally immersed in his work as an artist. And the Marx Brothers were wonderful and great, but they had a different working method. That's not to say they didn't work hard. It's just that the type of working situation on the set was different from the type of work ethic and discipline that Keaton did. He found that frustrating."
Scheide's own talk at this year's Celebration centers on Ruritania, the fictional European country Anthony Hope created for his book The Prisoner of Zenda, which influenced The Great Dictator and the Marxes' Duck Soup, which played at the Celebration.
Scheide says the Marx Brothers played characters that gradually changed into the more recognizable ones that are still funny decades later. At the beginning, their wit might have been more offensive than funny to modern viewers.
"One of the things I found fascinating about the Marx Brothers is that each one of them created a different ethnic stereotype. Groucho was German. Harpo was Irish. And Chico was Italian. Zeppo was sort of the all-American boy. That's sort of what these ethnic stereotypes melted into," Scheide explains. "They went beyond the stereotypes. Chico's stereotype continued, but Groucho did away with the accent, and Harpo, he didn't talk at all. Their own personalities took off, so the ethnic aspect, with the exception of Chico, just kind of got lost. But that was the foundation of where they came from."
Finding New Fans
In his work at the university and in Iola, Scheide says that it takes some work before audiences accustomed to color, sound, digital trickery and 3-D warm up to Keaton and the Marx Brothers' comedy. Nonetheless, audiences of all ages can still howl with delight at their work.
"What I try to do is start where we have a common interest in something. I teach freshman courses here at the University of Arkansas, and one of the things I try to do to introduce them to Chaplin is by showing the Richard Attenborough film Chaplin with Robert Downey Jr. They immediately relate to Robert, and it pulls them in," Scheide says. "With silent films, it's a different language, and it's different than what people expect to see in the 21st century. If it's presented properly and people are willing to give it a chance, they open up to it."
Curiously, new technology helped draw Scheide to Iola to celebrate older technology and comic art in the first place.
"Back in 1994, Listservs, a very crude type of blogs, were starting to come on the scene. And there was a reference librarian here at the University who said, 'You might be interested in this.' I got on it, and it turns out I wasn't interested in it. It ended up being a chatroom that wasn't as informative as I'd hoped. I wasn't on it very long, but there was one message on it that identified that Eleanor Keaton [Buster's widow] was coming to the second Celebration, and I didn't realize there was a Celebration. I looked and saw that Piqua was on the map, and I was curious about it and wanted to drive through there one time," he says.
"It was fortunate I didn't get out of that blog before I found out about that one really amazing bit of information."
MovieStyle on 10/02/2015