Buster Keaton’s penchant and skill for comedic stunts made him one of the biggest stars of the silent-film era. Nobody at the time imagined that he would still be engaging in dangerous-looking pratfalls 40 years later in his seventies, especially since his career seemed to have come to an end in 1926. That was the year of his Civil War-set film The General, which, though now critically respected, left contemporary audiences cold. Flops are, perhaps, inevitable, but this one happened to incorporate into the picture the most expensive shot in cinema history to date. As a result, says the Ming video above, “Keaton was never given control over his films again.”
Ironically, unlike the cinematic images that had made him famous, the $42,000 shot in The General did not put its director-star in apparent mortal peril, depicting only a railroad bridge collapsing while a train crosses it. Though undoubtedly impressive, it wouldn’t have been what people went to a Buster Keaton movie to see.
Here was a man willing, after all, to fly from the back of a moving streetcar, dangle off the edge of a waterfall, risk being crushed by an entire wall of a house, and even break his neck — though he didn’t discover that he’d done so until eleven years later. Making these and all of Keaton’s other famous stunts involved considerable amounts of both calculated danger and movie magic.
Some of that movie magic was conceived by Keaton himself, the first filmmaker, in Quentin Tarantino’s words, to “use cinema itself to be the joke.” Few performers could have adapted so well to the medium of silent film, with its realms of silent comedy just waiting to be opened. And after sound had been around for a few decades, longtime moviegoers started to feel like cinema had lost some of the visual exuberance that it once possessed. By that time, luckily, Keaton had emerged from his long post-General period of hard-drinking malaise, ready to appear not just in the movies again, but also on television, delighting the generations who remembered his earlier work and fascinating those too young to recognize him. Even today, when we find ourselves laughing at a scene of elaborately orchestrated physical danger, we are, in some sense, witnessing Keaton’s legacy.
Related content:
Watch the Only Time Charlie Chaplin & Buster Keaton Performed Together On-Screen (1952)
A Supercut of Buster Keaton’s Most Amazing Stunts
101 Free Silent Films: The Great Classics
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
