BUSTER KEATON REVISITED

Reprinted from the Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times

BOOKS

Buster Keaton Revisited

May 8, 2005

By JAN HERMAN

Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.

Like Welles, though in an earlier time and on a different scale, Keaton was a master filmmaker whose creativity was leached out of him by small-minded producers who at first recognized his genius, then proceeded to undermine him by jealously forcing him to conform to a studio system dominated by businessmen uninterested in his art. It's a familiar story, common to any number of Hollywood's great filmmakers from Erich von Stroheim to Francis Ford Coppola. But Keaton's story is particularly affecting because of the size and versatility of his achievement, and how far he fell from his peak of success.

Between 1920 and 1929, he conceived, wrote, directed, edited and starred in a dozen full-length silent features and 19 two-reel shorts that rivaled, some would say transcended, Chaplin's in their comic artistry. Marvels of precision engineering and high-risk pratfalls that Keaton always performed himself, his films were notable as well for visual gags attained through the so-called "camera magic" of trick shots. The stories, filmed on location in realistic settings, often contained surreal dream sequences and, unlike Chaplin's, were usually devoid of sentimentality.

Keaton gained worldwide fame and made millions of dollars. But with the arrival of talkies, he was largely forgotten. For almost 30 years, he became a nobody. He went broke, sank into alcoholism and depression, was divorced twice, and finally landed a small career in television. It wasn't until the late 1950s that his peerless silents -- among them "The General," "The Navigator" and "Sherlock Jr." -- were rediscovered and his reputation as a great artist resurrected.

McPherson has done his research. He retells the legend of Keaton's origins in vaudeville. Born in Kansas in 1896, Joseph Francis Keaton made his first appearance as a performer at 9 months of age, unbidden, when he crawled out on stage and tugged his father's leg to the vast amusement of the crowd. Harry Houdini, who had an act in the same traveling medicine show as Keaton's parents, dubbed him Buster (a vaudeville term for a pratfall) after little Joe, as a toddler of 18 months, fell down a flight of stairs and wasn't hurt. Buster, resilient and unsmiling, was soon being tossed around by his father like a medicine ball.

Billed as "The Human Mop," he played an insolent, seemingly indestructible hellion "whose many uses," McPherson writes, "included mopping the floor and getting thrown through backdrops, into the orchestra pit and off the stage." By age 10, Buster was a major attraction of the Three Keatons, which toured the country, bedeviled at times by the crusading Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which claimed he was being abused.

For all his research, however, McPherson has done no original reporting beyond seeing Keaton's films and describing their plot summaries, gags, set designs and characterizations in what becomes a catalog of many unnecessary details. Yet he avoid essentials. "'The General' is the kind of film," he writes, "that begs for maps, drawings, and diagrams (none of which I will include)." Why not? He relies almost exclusively on secondary sources for his facts and, surprisingly often, for opinions. This is deadly in a fan whose publisher wants him to be taken seriously, even if he himself wants to be taken lightly.

McPherson says he prefers to avoid the "psychoanalytical quagmire" of "the thesis-laden biographer" who sees "an interpretive Rorschach" in Keaton's trademark stone face. Similarly, he wants nothing to do with attempts by "many critics to fixate on [Keaton's] 'stoicism,' to make him over as a sort of existential hero, or weep for him as a bruised and battered soul." Fair enough. But he borrows too many insights from the very scholars, critics and biographers who've done the original reporting, for him to be so disdainful.

As far as I can tell, Tempest in a Flat Hat pretty much reiterates what has been said before by Keaton biographers Rudi Blesh, Tom Dardis and Marion Meade (whom McPherson acknowledges as sources), along with others, like film historian Kevin Brownlow, Keaton himself from a posthumously published memoir, My Wonderful World of Slapstick, co-written by Charles Samuels, and a memoir by his daughter.

Most unfortunately, McPherson writes potted prose. It is sometimes too painful to read. The cliches, mixed metaphors, nonsequiturs, anachronisms and general sloppiness make you wonder if an editor ever read the manuscript.

For example, "the economic razor of a Keaton plot takes no unnecessary detour." As for the collaborative process, McPherson writes, "Cross-pollination was the rule; you pulled any weight that came your way." Describing the 1920s, he notes, "Cars were mainly open-topped, often hand-cranked, and irrevocably transforming relations between the unwed sexes. ... Charles A. Lindbergh didn't yet know how to fly, though the transatlantic gauntlet had been tossed. ... Society roared along to the visceral virtuosity of a blaring new tune."

The writing also makes you wonder what facts to believe. A 1917 silent short is called a "Richard Lester-like homage." Lester wasn't born until 1932 and didn't direct a film until the 1960s. Simple facts are inconsistent or questionable. Keaton is 5 feet 4 inches tall on one page, 5 feet 6 on another. Hollywood in 1919 "found itself to be a international capital -- 80 percent of the movies in the world were being made in Southern California." The percentage is right, but Hollywood was no international capital then or for decades to come. It was a provincial company town.

Finally, the least a devoted Keaton fan could do is provide a filmography. For whatever reason, Tempest in a Flat Hat doesn't have one.