#BEST OF BUSTER KEATON MOVIES MOVIE#

Considered lost until a print was discovered in the attic of a Norwegian hospital in 1998, The Cook illustrates Arbuckle’s usual formula: pick a setting (here, a restaurant) and milk it for all the gags it is worth once they are exhausted, move to a different setting (here, a seaside amusement park) and start over. You can see this style at peak zaniness in Arbuckle-Keaton shorts like and The Cook and Good Night, Nurse (both 1918). Vaudeville, and its shameful cousin minstrelsy, also spawned a brand of humor that was surreal, absurdist, mined with irreverent spoofs and wild free-association, carried by the personalities and supercharged energy of the performers. A tough school in which survival depended on reliably making a hit with audiences, vaudeville honed its graduates into an invincible army of dancers, singers, actors, and comedians who went forth to conquer movies, radio, and television. Both emerged from vaudeville, the primordial soup of twentieth-century entertainment. They shared a birthplace (Kansas), a history as child performers, and difficult relationships with their fathers. Roscoe and Buster were both gentle souls who loved practical jokes and making people laugh. Over the course of their fourteen short comedies together, Keaton vaulted from third banana to equal partner, and the films themselves evolved from frenetic, Keystone-style anarchy to the cohesive plots, unhurried pacing, and elaborate, precisely-executed gags that became Keaton’s trademarks.Īrbuckle once said that Keaton “lived in the camera,” an insight that shows the deep understanding at the heart of their friendship. He was also extraordinarily generous and ego-less, readily ceding space to his talented protégé.

A deft and often elegant director, Arbuckle liked expansive backgrounds and self-referential jokes about cinema. “I just watched Arbuckle do it,” was his account of how he learned to make films. In the informal, rough-and-tumble freedom of Arbuckle’s Comique Film Corporation (called “Cumeeky” by its members), Keaton became a performer, gag writer, stunt man, and assistant director. Movies clicked with Keaton’s visual and mechanical genius and suited his innate perfectionism. Fascinated by the camera, he tore apart Arbuckle’s Bell and Howell and reassembled it, not satisfied until he understood how every last gear, sprocket, and shutter worked. Whether Keaton’s Broadway encounter really was serendipitous (or whether, as some scholars have suggested, he was intentionally recruited), he was instantly smitten with filmmaking. Keaton tore up his lucrative theater contract and never looked back. Arbuckle, impressed with his comic inventiveness and peerless gifts as a punching bag, promptly offered him a job. But everything changed when he stepped in front of the camera-a moment we can still watch, since, as Keaton loved to boast, his first scene in The Butcher Boy was done in a single take. Keaton was at a turning point, too, having recently left his family’s knockabout comedy act, The Three Keatons-fed up with the act’s declining fortunes and his father’s increasingly heavy drinking-and gotten his first solo gig in a prestigious stage revue, The Passing Show of 1917. The thirty-year-old Arbuckle had recently been enticed away from Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studio by producer Joseph Schenck, who offered him his own independent company.

#BEST OF BUSTER KEATON MOVIES MOVIE#

A silent film comedian then at the peak of his popularity, Arbuckle invited Keaton, a twenty-one-year-old vaudeville veteran who had never set foot in a movie studio, to come by and do a scene in his latest two-reeler, The Butcher Boy. Or so goes the story Buster Keaton often told about walking down Broadway and bumping into an old friend, Lou Anger, who introduced his companion, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. One of the most consequential chance meetings in cinema history occurred on a rainy day in March 1917 in New York City.

Three shorts directed by and starring Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle with featured player Buster Keaton

Best of buster keaton movies