by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The archive.org download
was a 1950 half-hour TV episode of something called The Buster Keaton Show, a live telecast from L.A. (supposedly the only
episode from this series known to exist!) sponsored by the Studebaker Dealers
of Los Angeles (and since my stepfather had a 1950 Studebaker there was a
personal bit of nostalgia for me in looking at that car, with its
spacecraft-style front end designed by the legendary Raymond Loewy, again!), in
which Keaton (in his 50’s and definitely looking the worse for wear — the years
of alcoholism had taken their toll on him, though he was still surprisingly
spry physically and it was amazing how well he was able to do slapstick live!) plays a man who goes in for physical training and
ends up practicing in the ring with a fighter who’s legendary for beating the
crap out of anyone who looks on his wife with lust. The script, not
surprisingly (especially given that Clyde Bruckman, one of Keaton’s key
collaborators from his glory years in the 1920’s, is one of the credited
writers), rips off a lot of the
Keaton silents, including Battling Butler and Spite Marriage, and the tackiness of the production has to be seen to be believed (not
only the cheesy sets common to live TV shows but the audible mistakes made by
the actors), but Keaton manages to maintain his dignity and be quite amusing if
not as laugh-out-loud funny as he was in the 1920’s. Ironically, within five years Clyde Bruckman, broke (largely because he’d been sued for plagiarism by Harold Lloyd — for reusing gags Bruckman had originally creted for Lloyd!) and out of work, shot himself in a Beverly Hills restaurant with a gun Keaton had loaned him — a real pity for the co-director of Keaton’s greatest films, Sherlock, Jr. and The General, as well as two of W. C. Fields’ best, the short The Fatal Glass of Beer and the feature The Man on the Flying Trapeze.
