Editorial Review of The Navigator, courtesy of Amazon.com

Buster Keaton in 'The Navigator' - from the deep sea diving scene

Buster Keaton revisits his familiar persona of a spoiled society dandy thrown into the surreal world. Young millionaire Rollo Treadway (the sap in the family tree, according to a title card) embarks on a long voyage to nurse his broken heart when his lady love, Kathryn McGuire, turns down his proposal of marriage. Of course he winds up on the wrong dock and boards a derelict ship, which (as luck would have it) McGuire has also boarded. Foreign spies set the ship adrift on the high seas, stranding the pampered heirs, who must now fend for themselves. Keaton indulges in his love of Rube Goldberg contraptions with an elaborate jungle of levers and hatches that turns a giant galley into a veritable automat and dives into 20th-century technology when he dons a diving suit for a hilarious underwater sequence. McGuire makes a marvelous comic partner for Keaton, a gifted physical comedian and a spunky love interest, while the ship plays straight man to their pratfalls and gags, practically coming alive like a haunted house in their first terrified night aboard. The match between man and massive machine proved so successful that Keaton returned to the concept for his two greatest comedies, The General and Steamboat Bill Jr. Also featured are a pair of appropriately aquatic shorts: The Boat, in which Buster packs his family into a leaky houseboat, and The Love Nest, which pits castaway Buster against a despotic captain. –Sean Axmaker

Product Description
Brilliantly exemplifying Buster Keaton’s ability to mine rich humor from the inanimate, “The Navigator” (1924, 65 min.) is a classic of the Golden Age of Comedy. Keaton stars as Rollo Treadway, an inexperienced lad of extraordinary wealth, but little common sense. He finds himself adrift on “The Navigator,” a 500-foot yacht, with no one but an equally naive girl (Kathryn McGuire). Together they face the misadventures that befall them on the high seas, from cannibals to unfamiliar domesticity. As a special feature, this DVD includes two additional shorts demonstrating Keaton’s penchant for maritime mayhem. In “The Boat” (1921, 22 min.), Buster and family set sail aboard the homemade “Damfino,” while in “The Love Nest” (1923, 20 min.), a recently rediscovered lost film, he trades sailboat for U-boat to plumb new depths of hilarity.

Mr. Mulligan, a rather dour critic of his times, is shortly to discover the import of that old phrase, ‘Out of the frying pan, into the fire,’ said fire burning brightly at all times in the Twilight Zone.

Woodrow Mulligan, complaining of the high prices and noise, dreams of moving somewhere quiet … and while working for his boss, Professor Gilbert, he has his chance.  The Professor has finished work on a “time helmet” and Woodrow uses it to escape to the future — only to find that 1960 is far more noisy and busy than his own time.

Buster Keaton Eats Levy Jewish Rye

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Stranded in the future, with the time helmet broken, he makes the acquaintance of a scientist who believes his strange tale, and takes his to a fix-it shop where a handyman, played by comedy veteran Jesse White, attempts to fix it.  The scientist, however, plans to hijack the time helmet for himself, and escape to the idyllic 1890’s himself.  All turns out well, however, as Woodrow jumps ‘on board’, and the two are back in the 1890’s.

However, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, and the scientist is soon miserable in the past — and the compassionate Woodrow sends him back to his own time with the helmet.  As Rod Serling says in his closing remarks,

‘To each his own’ - so goes another old phrase to which Mr. Woodrow Mulligan would heartily subscribe, for he has learned, definitely the hard way, that there is much wisdom in a third old phrase which goes as follows: ‘Stay in your own backyard.’ To which it might be added, ‘and if possible, assist others to stay in theirs’ - via, of course, the Twilight Zone.

In short, Once Upon a Time is simply a hilarious vehicle for Buster Keaton, with the sequences in the 1890’s silent with talking conveyed by slides.  It’s simply hilarious, with Buster Keaton turning simple activities such as crossing a street, opening a door, or drying his pants into comic gold.  Even more so are the scenes set in the 1960’s, where he interacts with the ‘technological wonders’ of the ‘future’, such as a television (”the fellow in the window”), a vacuum cleaner, etc. as well as having a comedy partner in the overweight scientist, making for some comedy highlights as he tries to avoid being arrested for not wearing any pants, since he left them behind in 1890.

All in all, Once Upon a Time is a comedy treat, that I recommend highly.

Trivia for Once Upon a Time - episode of The Twilight Zone starring Buster Keaton

• Leslie Goodwins was uncredited for writing the fix-it shop episode more than a month after production of the episode had ended and the bulk of the photography was finished. He came down to do the pick ups.
• The old-fashioned clothes wringer that Buster is using to wash his pants in the beginning is the same kind of wringer that crushed his right forefinger when he was 3 years old. A curious little boy, he got his finger caught in the rollers and a doctor had to amputate it at the first knuckle. In this episode, he gets the same finger caught in the wringer for laughs.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, starring Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, Buster Keaton

“Something familiar, something peculiar, something for everyone: a comedy tonight!” Those words from the opening song pretty much describe the menu in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a frantic adaptation of the stage musical by Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove. The wild story, set in ancient Rome, follows a slave named Pseudolus (Zero Mostel, snorting and gibbering) as he tries to extricate himself from an increasingly farcical situation; Mostel and a bevy of inspired clowns, including Phil Silvers, Jack Gilford, and Buster Keaton, keep the slapstick and the patter perking. The cast also includes the young Michael Crawford as a love-struck innocent. This project landed in the lap of Richard Lester, then one of the hottest directors in the world after his success with the Beatles’ films. Lester telescoped the material through his own joke-a-second sensibility, and also ripped out some of the songs from Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway score. The result is a pixilated romp and very close to the vaudeville spirit suggested by the title–though anyone with a low tolerance for Zero Mostel’s overbearing buffoonery may be in trouble. Oddly enough, amidst all the frenzy, Lester creates a grungy, earthy Rome that seems closer to the real thing than countless respectable historical films on the subject. –Robert Horton

Product Description
Something appealing. Something appalling. Something for everyone a comedy tonight! “One of the hottest burlesque shows that ever hit Broadway” (Time) comes to the screen showcasing the enormous talents of Tony Award (r) winner Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, Jack Gilford (Cocoon), Buster Keaton and Michael Crawford (Broadway’s “The Phantom of the Opera”). Featuring keenly clever tunes like “Comedy Tonight” and “Lovely,” this wild Stephen Sondheim musical about a raucous gaggle of ancient Romans is a “flip, glib and sophisticated, yet rump-slapping bawdy and fast-paced look at the seamy underside of classical Rome through hipster’s shades” (Variety).When a wily, witty, lying, lazy, cheating slave discovers that his master’s son is in love with   next doora virgin courtesan he promises to help win her heart in exchange for his freedom. But the road to romance is blocked with stunning surprises, cunning disguises and the wildest chariot race ever!

The art of making and throwing them as told by Buster Keaton.

Ironically, even though most people associate pie throwing with silent film comedies, Buster Keaton never took a pie in the face in any of his silent films - and he only threw a pie once (at Fatty Arbuckle in The Garage) where he missed.  Later in his career, however, he did throw pies on television on the Ed Wynn show, and had a color pie fight with a young Alice Faye in Hollywood Cavalcade.  Quoting Buster from his autobiography, My Wonderful World of Slapstick:

“I had not thrown a custard-pie for years and lost no time in getting in some practice when not busy on the set.

I started by drawing a circle on the wall in white chalk, this was the approximate size of Alice Faye’s lovely blonde head. I used a wooden plate as my practice “pie”. When this proved too light I kept on driving nails into it until it weighed about as the custard-pies Roscoe, Al StJohn and I had so much fun throwing at one another in the old days. I practiced throwing the plate from various distances. I have always considered myself the world’s champion custard-pie thrower, and slowly my old marksmanship returned.”

Buster Keaton demonstrates pie throwing

[A note about the pies used by Buster Keaton in his pie throwing routines.  Many people presently use real pies, complete with a tin or aluminum plate, when throwing a pie.  This is actually hazardous, as it's possible to break a nose.  As Kenny Ahern, one of the instructors at the UW La Crosse Clown Camp explains, "splat, don't slam" -- in other words, you use your body language to make it look like you're throwing the pie, but in actuality you're lightly placing the pie in the person's face.  Buster Keaton, however, used a different kind of pie entirely.

Buster had the studio's bakers make two crusts cooked until they were brittle, and then glued one inside the other with a paste of flour and water. The double crust served as the pie tin, so there was no risk of injuring the other person.]

“I worried about her flinching. Besides spoiling the shot, this would mean hours of delay while Alice took a shower, got a whole new make-up job, a hairdo, and was fitted for duplicate clothes outfit.

I decided not to warn her when the great moment approached. After talking it over with Dwan, we placed George Givot, who was playing the villain, between Alice and me. Givot faced me, but Alice standing right behind him was faced in the opposite direction. Givot was told he should turn the girl around slowly as I started to say my line, which was “We will see who gets the girl!” He would hold her in front of him using her as a shield. After timing this using another girl for Alice, I suggested that if the word ‘now’ where added, it would give me time to deliver the pie at the right split second.

When we made the shot Givot turned Alice round too quickly, which forced me to speed up my throw. Consequently the pie hit her in the face harder than was necessary.

You never saw a more stunned looking girl in your life than Alice Faye that day. We required no retake, but Alice did not thank me for that. As the camera was being moved to the next location I saw her go over to a table on which the pies for the other scenes were waiting to be used. Alice picked one up and weighed it in her hand, then tried several others. When she found one she liked, she headed towards me on the run. I leaped up and ran, but Alice chased me off the sound stage and clear out of the studio holding all the while that menacing custard-pie in her hand.”

When Buster Keaton taught pie throwing technique to Ed Wynn on his TV show, he described the 5 different types of pie throws that they used.

1. The Walking Thrust - Walk up to the person to be pied, push the pie in their face, and before you walk away give it a slight twist. This makes the sticky part of the pie cling to the recipient.
2. The Shot Putt - Thrown from a distance of three to five feet.
3. With shots over eight feet, you need to make sure the pie is of the right weight to fly perpendicular as it leaves your fingers.
4. The Ancient Roman Discus Throw - Spin half way around turning the pie as you whirl and then let go, hitting the victim square in the face.
5. Catchers Throw to Second Base - The hardest of all. Pull back your arm just as far as it will go, and then bring the pie in “all the way from East St. Louis” - and let it fly

Comedies Greatest Era, By James Agee - originally published in Life Magazine September 5th 1949

The Great Stone Face

Buster Keaton started work at the age of 31/2 with his parents in one of the roughest acts in vaudeville (”The Three Keatons”; Harry Houdini gave the child the name Buster in admiration for a fall he took down a flight of stairs. In his first movies Keaton teamed with Fatty Arbuckle under Sennett. He went on to become one of Metro’s biggest stars and earners; a Keaton feature cost about $200,000 to make and reliably grossed $2 million. Very early in his movie career friends asked him why he never smiled on the screen. He didn’t realize he didn’t. He had got the dead-pan habit in variety; on the screen he had merely been so hard at work it never occurred to him that there was anything to smile about. Now he tried it just once and never again. He was by his whole style and nature so much the most deeply “silent” of the silent comedians that even a smile was as deafeningly out of key as a yell. In a way his pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of response is the juggler’s effortless, uninterested face.

Keaton’s face ranked almost with Lincoln’s as an early American archetype; it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful, yet it was irreducibly funny; he improved matters by topping it off with a deadly horizontal hat, as flat and thin as a phonograph record. One can never forget Keaton wearing it, standing erect as the prow of his little boat is being launched. The boat goes gradually down the skids and, just as grandly, straight on to the bottom. Keaton never budges. The last you see of him, the water lifts the hat off the stoic head and it floats away.

No other comedian could do as much with the dead-pan. He used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things; a one track mind near the track’s end of pure insanity; mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances; how dead a human being can get and still be alive; an awe-inspiring sort of patients and power to endure, proper to granite but uncanny in flesh and blood. Everything that he was and did bore out this rigid face and played laughs against it. When he moved his eyes, it was like seeing them move in a statue. His short-legged body was all sudden, machinelike angles, governed by a daft aplomb. When he swept a semaphorelike arm to point you could almost here the electrical impulse to the signal block. When he ran from a cop, his transitions from accelerating walk to easy jogtrot to brisk canter to headlong gallop to flogged-piston sprint – always floating, above this frenzy, the untroubled, untouchable face – were as distinct and as soberly in order as an automatic gearshift.

Keaton was a wonderfully resourceful inventor of mechanistic gags (he still spends much of his time fooling with Erector sets); as he ran afoul of locomotives, steamships prefabricated and over-electrified houses, he put himself through some of the hardest and cleverest punishment ever designed for laughs. In Sherlock Jr., boiling along on the handlebars of a motor cycle quite unaware that he has lost his driver, Keaton whips through city traffic, breaks up a tug-of-war, gets a shovel full of dirt in the face from each of a long line of Rockette-timed ditch diggers, approaches a log at high speed which is hinged open by dynamite precisely soon enough to let him through and, hitting an obstruction, leaves the handlebars like an arrow leaving a bow, whams through the window of a shack in which the heroin is about to be violated, and hits the heavy feet-first knocking him through the opposite wall. The whole sequence is as clean in motion as the trajectory of a bullet.

Much of the charm and edge of Keaton’s comedy, however, lay in the subtle leverages of expression he could work against his nominal dead pan. Trapped in the side wheel of a ferryboat, saving himself from drowning only by walking, then desperately running like a squirrel in a cage, his only real concern was, obviously, to keep his hat on. Confronted by Love, he was not as dead-pan as he was cracked up to be, either; there was an odd, abrupt motion of his head which suggested a horse nipping at a sugar lump.

Keaton worked strictly for laughs, but his work came from so far inside a curious and original spirit that he achieved a great deal more besides, especially in his feature length comedies. (For plain hard laughter his 19 short comedies – the negatives of which have been lost – were even better.) He was the only major comedian who kept sentiment almost entirely out of his work, and he brought pure physical comedy to its greatest heights. Beneath his lack of emotion, he was also uninsistantly sardonic; deep below that, giving a disturbing tension and grandeur to the foolishness, for those who sensed it, in his comedy there was a freezing whisper not of pathos but of melancholia. With the humour, the craftsmanship and the action there was often, besides, a fine, still and sometimes dreamlike beauty. Much of his Civil War picture The General is within hailing distance of Mathew Brady. And there is a ghostly, unforgettable moment in The Navigator when, on a deserted, softly rolling ship, all the pale doors along a deck swing open as one behind Keaton and, as one, slam shut in a hair-raising illusion of noise.

Perhaps because ‘dry’ comedy is so much more rare and odd than ‘dry’ wit, there are people that never much cared for Keaton. Those who do cannot care mildly.

Natalie Talmadge Keaton has police stop comedian, after he takes youngsters on forbidden plane trip - Buster kids away separation, but claims he is still boss.

Buster kidded divorce rumors by having pictures taken of himself and his two boys, Joseph, 9 and Robert, 8, forlornly “waiting for Mama to come home” (right). And Natalie Talmadge Keaton (with comedian, below) soon forgave him for taking the youngsters on ‘plane ride.

Buster Keaton and his two sons, 'waiting for Mother to return'

Natalie Talmadge Keaton, the wife and mother, rushed to the District Attorney to ask him to have the actor detained at San Diego, where he would have to pause for customs inspection. Newspaper reporters were panting to write a divorce story about the Keatons. Women’s clubs were wondering if they would have to turn thumbs’ down on future Keaton pictures. Everything was at stake. A false move might have meant the loss not only of wife, but of a career as a wooden-faced comedian in the movies.

Even an experienced publicity man might well have trembled at “breaking the story” right. But no publicity man could have done the job better than Buster, himself. Amazed at the excitement and hubbub his impulsive airplane trip had stirred up, surrounded with police and reporters “and the army and navy,” according to Buster, he did the one thing that saved the situation.

Buster Keaton and his first wife, Natalie Talmadge

He kidded it. A woman may be very angry, but she isn’t going to stay angry when she finds people laughing about it. The newspapers carried photographs of Buster and the boys (Joseph, 9 and Robert, gloomily “waiting for Mama to come home.” They carried funny interviews with Buster, telling of his rehearsing the youngsters in their lines when Natalie returned. Mention of the “whale oil lamp trimmed and burning in the window to light Mama home” set a continent to chuckling.

And it probably is. After all marriage that has weathered the storms of fifteen years - even such a severe hurricane as the Kathleen Key fracas in Buster’s dressing-room in February, 1930, in which he claimed he was “womanhandled” - can weather many more.

[Please note the misprint in the list of Keaton's released films. "The Ghost" should read "The Goat"! There is also a discrepancy here and between Keaton's telling of the Pickway hurrican incident.]

Young as he is, Buster Keaton has seen much of the face of the earth. He began moving when, at the ripe old age of two weeks, he was moved from the little town of Pickway, Kan., where he was born. And it is a noteworthy thing that, no matter how famous he may become, he can never go back to that town. Sad, isn’t it? But it must not be supposed that Buster is in anyway to blame for his banishment. You see at the time Buster was born, his father and Harry Houdini, the “Handcuff King” were owners of a medicine show. They left Pickway, but about two months after they started on their way along came a lively young cyclone and blew the town off the map. And nobody thought it of enough importance to build it up again.

So Buster became a wanderer. His parents used to say of him that he couldn’t get lost anymore than he could get killed.

Buster Keaton Joseph Francis Keaton) American Comic Actor
Mainly in Silent FilmsPhotographic Print
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Up to the time he was six months old, he had the dignified name of Joseph Francis. And then, one day, he fell downstairs from the top to the landing. “What a buster.” Said Harry Houdini, when he found he wasn’t hurt. “And Buster’s his nam!” said his father; so he’s been Buster ever since.

As a child Buster was perhaps the most vociferously pitied youngster in the country. This was especially the case in the state of New York where the Gerry Society repeated accused his father of cruelty. And not the Gerry Society alone. Managers of theaters, at which the “The Three Keatons” appeared, would be deluged with notes from sympathetic women protesting at the way in which “that poor child” was treated.

“My father used to carry me on the stage and drop me. After explaining to the audience that I liked it, he would pick me up and throw me at a piece of scenery, sometimes knocking the scenery down with me and sometimes not. He would often throw me as far as thirty feet.”

When in England, the manager of the theater insisted that Buster must have been stolen or adopted, or something. He said that no parents would treat their own child as his father and mother treated him. and on another occasion in New York, he had to be carried before the Governor of the state and stripped in order to prove that he had no broken bones! As a matter of fact, he didn’t even have any bruises. He had been thoroughly taught how to take his falls.

Keaton lives with his wife, formerly Natalie Talmadge, in a typical California home in the Wilshire district of Los Angeles. He is the father of a 20-months-old boy, Joseph Talmadge Keaton.

In 1917 he left the stage for moving pictures, planning to settle down in one city for more than two weeks for the first time in his life. But his plans were upset, just as were the plans of thousands of other boys, and he marched away to make a tour of Europe.

He appeared with Roscoe Arbuckle in nine comedies. Before being elevated to head his own company in the two reel field, he was co-starred with William Crane in “The Saphead.” He was then given his own company by Joseph Schenck.

Following “One Week” he made “The Scarecrow,” “Neighbors,” “The Haunted House,” “Hard Luck,” and “The Ghost.” [The Goat]

Through First National Keaton released “The Playhouse,” “The Boat,” “Day Dreams,” “The Love Nest,” “The Electric House,” “Cops,” “The Blacksmith” and “The Balloonatic.”

I went to interview Buster Keaton with one ambition in mind–I would make him smile just to see if he could. He can. He favored me with a broad grin, upon our introduction. Maybe he thought I was funny, but that’s another story.

The comedian makes a business of never smiling during his films. When he was asked why he said that he didn’t consider his work any joke. He has acquired the habit of keeping his face immobile only through years of study, and it is perhaps because of this very trait that the Keaton face has become famous. At least that is one of the reasons. It was difficult to make him say anything. I never saw anybody so unwilling to talk. This is a characteristic which Buster must find very helpful on lost of occasions. Anyway, being a star of the silent drama seems to have its effect.

Well, after we sat quite still for a few moments I decided to ask him how he liked the baseball games. He came on for the especial purpose of viewing the world series and so it was not amiss to imagine that he would want to say something about it.

“Oh, the games,” said Mr. Keaton, “they were fine.”

“Were you satisfied with the outcome of them?” said I.

“Sure,” replied Buster. “I bet on the Yanks.”

“Did you win much?”

“Not much; a couple of dinners and the tickets.”

That seemed to conclude the conversation so far as he was concerned.

“When are you going back to Los Angeles?” I ventured next. I knew all the time that he was leaving in the afternoon of the same day, but it made something to say.

“This afternoon,” and Buster considered that settled.

“You will be glad to get back, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

Buster Keaton and his son, Buster Keaton Jr.

It seemed that he agreed with me on that subject too. Buster fumbled for his watch, and I thought he was about to commit the deadly sin of looking at it, but he had no such idea in mind. Attached to the other end of the watch chain was a little platinum locket. Silently he opened it and presented it to me. A cherubic face smiled out at me. It was Buster Keaton, Jr.

“Does he look like you?” I ventured.

“Exactly,” Buster assured me. It was the first display of enthusiasm.

“I thought so,” said I as I handed him back the locket, assuring him it was the loveliest picture of a child I had ever seen. That must have made a hit with Buster, for right away he began to take more of an interest in the interview. The next time I interview anybody who seems to not care much about it I am going to ask straight away if he happens to have a picture of his baby with him. If he has I’ll know what to do, and if he hasn’t I’m going to consider myself out of luck.

Mr. Keaton then proceeded to divulge some secret about the making of comedy pictures. It seems they have no script at all.

“You could write the whole plot on a post card,” said he, “we do the rest.”

So far as I could understand the making of comedies is very much like the juvenile sport of “playin’ theatre.” You don’t know just what you’ll do until you do it.

“The director, a couple of scenario writers and I sit around and discuss a scene. That is how the gags are made,” said Mr. Keaton. “Then we shoot the scene. Lots of things develop during the actual taking of the picture which we hadn’t thought out at all.”

Having learned all there seemed to be to learn about the simple process of making comedies I asked him if he ever thought of confining his activities to the more serious drama. Did he have any secret longing to play Hamlet or Macbeth? Buster hadn’t. He looked disapprovingly at me for the mere suggestion of such a thing. I don’t believe he cares much about the two gentlemen in question.

“I would like to play ‘Merton of the Movies’ though,” he said.

Then somebody said something which struck Buster as humorous and he smiled a broader smile than I thought him capable of.

“How,” said I, “do you keep from laughing during the filming of your pictures, or don’t you believe in laughing at your own jokes?”

“It is hard sometimes,” he confided. “I particularly remember one time in Philadelphia, where I went to attend the opening of one of the Loew theatres. We paraded up and down the streets in automobiles and I had on my serious expression. Lots of little kids yelled, ‘Why don’t yer give us a smile. Somebody tickle him and make him laugh,’ and so on, and it was hard that time not to burst right out laughing.”

Then we came back to the subject of Buster, Jr., again. He appeared in Buster, Sr.’s last picture, “Hospitality.” It was his debut as a screen actor. Incidentally, father and mother Keaton appeared in the same picture with son Buster, and Natalie was in it, too, making three generations of Keatons in the one offering.

“He’s a great kid,” said Buster, Sr., proudly. “And there’s a vacant space in the other side of the locket, you may have noticed. I’m reserving that.”

“Well, he sure is a lovely kid,” I reiterated, first because I really meant it and secondly because the subject of the baby seemed to be a common bond of interest.

“He sure is,” Buster agreed, and it was plain to be seen there was no argument there.

“Well,” I chirped, “know any more jokes?”

It was inopportune and Buster noticed it. He actually laughed, but loud this time.

“What do you think of that; I show her the baby’s picture and she asks me do I know any more jokes.”

Evidently I had made an unforeseen nifty, but we laughed that off and everything was fine. Keaton left for Los Angeles last week and expects to begin work on a new picture soon. What it will be about he hasn’t an idea, but between you and me and the rest of the world I’ll bet it will be funny.

For a long time it was considered a breach of critical etiquette, if there be such a thing, to write of any one engaged in such a lowly sphere as that of comedy. It was little short of lese majesty to strum one’s lyre in praise of such funny fellows as Fred Mace, John Bunny, Mack Swain, and the then blooming Chaplin. Some few did it: venturesome souls, but as a general thing it was discouraged.

Times, capriciously enough, have changed. Today Charlot is hymned by the literati and the cognoscenti, the beautiful and the damning. The mere mention of his name is sufficient to start a feverish discussion in the highest circles, even including the well-known vicious one at the Algonquin. The critics have decided that the abominable movies have produced something worth while in this harlequin of the mustachios and baggy trousers. Five years hence they will discover Buster Keaton. In writing of the leading drolls of the flittering photos, it is tempting to take a leaf from Eugene Field’s “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” for it is conceded, almost without question, that the preeminent names today are Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd.

The methods of the three are utterly unlike. Each leads an individual School of the Snicker. The comedy of Chaplin is most often elusive, bordering on the serious if not the tragic. Nothing more typical can be instanced than his moment of contemplation beside the manhole, in “The Kid“–an amazing commingling of pathos and humor. In an earlier two-reeler, “The Bank,” the great comedian also officiated at the wedding of smile and tear. It is characteristic of Chaplin to appeal to philosophers as well as to flappers. We laugh with Lloyd, but we laugh at Keaton. These two may better be compared than Lloyd and Chaplin or Keaton and Chaplin, because Charlie is so infinitely superior, amusing though the other pair are.

Neither Keaton nor Lloyd attempt to reach your funny bone through your heart: they openly tickle you. For this reason, most of all, perhaps they are not in Chaplin’s class. For Chaplin has always stood alone. Many of Harold Lloyd’s pictures have whole slices played in straight comedy vein. Keaton is rarely heroic; at such fleeting times he invariably makes a swift and laughter-grafting turn to grotesquerie. Buster’s stuff borders on the realm of burlesque; Lloyd at times suggests a Willie Collier of the shadow stage. His is the school sponsored by Sidney Drew, embellished with quips and quirks and occasional stunts that are solely Lloyd’s. Originality marks the method of all leaders, and certainly this is true of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd.

“That’s the one thing that I dread,” Buster told me sadly. “I dread the day when we won’t find another new wheeze to wrap up, when all the gags will have been sprung, when we’re stumped for something new. That’s what a comedian has to guard against: running out. That is why Charlie Chaplin makes his pictures so slowly. I know as a matter of fact that he takes thousands of feet of film on every picture, only to destroy it when he sees it in the projection room. And this carefulness is just what helps to make him a great artist.”

Keaton is master of snicker and guffaw technique. His art is to work up a situation deliberately, to build it as logically and as systematically as a carpenter builds a house. Gags, Buster told me, are natural or mechanical.

“Both get laughs,” he explained, “but the natural gag is the one we lay awake nights trying to dream of.”

And it is the mechanical gag that Keaton has mastered. Take the situation in “The Boat,” where, after having built a boat, he finds that he has not made the doorway large enough, and consequently, as the boat slides to the water, it pulls the shed down with it. Take the situation in “One Week.” Buster has ordered a Sears-Roebuck bungalow for his bride-to- be. The wicked rival mixes the numerals on the various parts, and the comedy ensues when Buster attempts to assemble the jazzed sections. This is mechanically perfect giggle material. But though one of the most adroit technicians of comedy. Buster fails to reach the heart, his pictures elude the sympathy. It seems consistent to endow Chaplin with massive intellect, to read sermons into his capering feet. It is fairly simple to sympathize with the lovesick Harold Lloyd, upon occasion. But Keaton alone stands forth as the Trouper–unabashed, unaffected, unassuming, and–very like Shaw’s Undershaft –unashamed!

“We just wrap up a little hokum,” he will tell you. “We build up a little story on some sure-fire idea, throw in a dozen gags, if we can think of ‘em, and let ‘er ride. The scenario we use is written on the correspondence end of a picture post card. If it’s lost its no great matter.”

You cannot read hidden motifs into the Keaton spoolings. You cannot persuade him that there was a hint of satire concealed in his last comedy, or the one before that. You cannot coerce him into admitting that he planned an unique characterization which he has steadfastly maintained. He will take credit for nothing. Not even his make-up.

“The pancake hat and the oversized collar and the misfit suit and the slapstick shoes are my old vaudeville stand-bys. My father rigged me out as a third of The Three Keatons, when I was too young to ‘originate’ anything but a yowl! I’ve kept the same make-up ever since–guess I always will.”

Solemnity is more than a habit with Keaton; it’s ingrown. Throughout our conversation his face was stony. Nor was this an exception to his usual attitude. I have seen him in the turmoil of a comic sequence, a business of break-away ladders, swinging ropes, and trapdoor scaffoldings; I have seen him eyeing the proceedings at one of Manhattan’s most energizing nights clubs; I have seen him purring at his baby in father-like fashion; I have seen him casually viewing the day’s rushes, and upon not one but all of these occasions Buster wore an expression that was infinitely more sphinxlike than the Sphinx ever thought of being. His is an entirely emotionless face, suggesting most of all, a mask. It is the ideal phiz for a droll pantaloon.

“You originated the idea of never smiling,” I supposed. But Buster refused to take credit for it. In the days of The Three Keatons, it seems, his father taught him never to crack a smile. The habit grew on him. Now it is so deeply rooted that it is almost impossible for him to grin. It has long been one of the beliefs of the American Credo that all comedians are, off stage, lugubrious fellows, and never was a truth more apparent than in the appearance and behavior of Buster Keaton. His countenance is little short of funereal, his speech laconic, his outlook none too sanguine.

“Next I’m going back to the Coast to do a five-reel picture. No plots, you know. Just gags. But we’ll space our laughs. If we ran five reels of the sort of stuff we cram into two, the audience would be tired before it was half over. So we’ll plant the characters more slowly, use introductory bits, and all that. It’ll be just as easy to make a five-reeler, because we always take about fifteen reels, anyway. Now we’ll cut to five instead of two.”

Buster thinks “One Week” his best comedy, but he admits he had hoped to make “The Playhouse” his best. In that clever picture, he essayed a dozen or more roles. He had intended doing all of the parts, but his ego failed him at the crucial moment. Despite the fact that he is one of the big drawing cards, often featured in the lights and billed above the longer picture of the program, Keaton has assumed no airs, adopted no pose. He denied that he made a preparation for a picture. He denied that he planned his plots. Try as you will, you cannot convince him that he is anything more than a trouper who manages to give ‘em what they like. It is useless to talk to him of psychological effects.

“It’s hokum,” said Buster definitely and positively. “And by draping it in different styles you disguise it and bring results each time.”

According to his lights, it is simply a case of old gags in new clothing. But if this were so, there would be more Keatons. Unfortunately enough, there aren’t.