Word: keaton
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...Keaton is usually enshrined with Charles Chaplin and Harold Lloyd in silent comedy's holy trinity. In fact, his true film siblings are the old adventure stars Douglas Fairbanks and William S. Hart. Like Fairbanks, Keaton performed gorgeous, reckless stunts; his films were thrillers culminating in wild cyclones (Steamboat Bill, Jr.) and boat disasters (The Navigator). Like Hart, Keaton was the American loner: a dour, improbably heroic figure beneath a hostile...
...famous for not smiling. In a lovely moment from Go West, a tough cowpoke orders him at gunpoint to smile; after considering whether he'd rather die, Keaton fingers the corners of his mouth into an awful grimace. But this blank visage was a versatile comic instrument. The giant eyes spoke all manner of emotions: ardor, terror, despair, sheer mulishness. The Keaton deadpan is stoic, heroic and as thoroughly modernist as a Beckett play or a Bauhaus facade. Next to him, Chaplin is a Victorian coquette, Lloyd a glad-handing politician...
...Joseph Keaton Jr. was born to a knockabout vaudeville family and quickly put on the stage. The lad toured with his family until 1917, when he entered films as second banana to Fatty Arbuckle. In 1920, Keaton left Arbuckle to make his own movies. The medium was still in its infancy; comics were pioneering the craft of making people laugh at moving images. Keaton, it turns out, knew it all-intuitively. His body, honed by vaudeville pratfalls, was a splendid contraption. And as a director, Keaton was born fully mature. He was just 25 then, and as eager to mine...
...shipmate in The Navigator seems inadvertently bent on drowning Buster every five minutes. And the Southern belle in The General nearly loses the Civil War three years early. Exasperated by her "helpfulness," he impulsively throttles her, then kisses her, then returns to the job at hand. Of all Keaton's females, only one stole his heart: the cow Brown Eyes in Go West...
Buster seemed so solitary, so oblivious to sentiment, that no one could touch him or catch him. The classic Keaton climax is of Buster walking blithely down a Los Angeles street while a herd of women, cops--cows, even--chases after him. And when he is caught, when Boy and Girl end up married, it's not necessarily a happy ending. In the coda to College we see the couple as newlyweds, then as young parents, then as bickering old folks, then as names on their tombstones. Sometimes...