by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Before The Freshman
TCM ran So Funny It Hurt: Buster Keaton & MGM, a documentary by Kevin Brownlow (who had previously
collaborated with the late David Gill on a three-hour film about Keaton’s whole
career, A Hard Act to Follow) and
Christopher Bird, about how Keaton’s career collapsed when Joseph Schenck,
who’d produced his films throughout the 1920’s, decided to close the company he
and Keaton had formed after Steamboat Bill, Jr. in 1928. Schenck urged Keaton to sign with MGM
because Schenck’s brother Nicholas was the company president and would protect
him. Alas, though Nicholas Schenck ran the business end of MGM from New York,
he had little or no creative role in the company; the studio itself was run by
Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, who were excellent producers (Mayer was
mostly responsible for keeping the studio going administratively and Thalberg
was the creative production head) but had little or no patience with unique filmmaking
talents who wanted to control their own destinies. The list of directors who
bombed out at MGM because they couldn’t deal with the factory-like production
system is legendary, including Erich von Stroheim, Joseph von Sternberg,
Mauritz Stiller, Victor Seastrom, Rupert Hughes (Howard Hughes’ uncle), Maurice
Tourneur (Jacques Tourneur’s father) and Buster Keaton.
Actually Keaton’s
career had begun to decline in 1926, two years before the date given here, with
the release of The General; today
it’s considered Keaton’s masterpiece, a comedy classic with a nervy mix of
terror and humor that seems quite modern today. But in 1926 it was a movie that
had cost way too much to make — Keaton’s mania for authenticity, especially in
depicting Civil War-era railroading (he insisted on shooting the film in Oregon
because they still had a railroad that ran on the narrow-gauge track in use
during the Civil War), meant the film cost more than $1 million to make (more
than had ever been spent on a comedy before), and it was Keaton’s first
box-office flop. At least part of that may be due to Joseph Schenck having just
taken the reins of United Artists, and bringing the Keaton releases with him —
United Artists didn’t have the clout of Schenck’s previous distributor, MGM — but
the contemporary reviews indicate that the nervous mix of comedy and war drama
that seems modern about The General
simply put off 1926 audiences. “Some of the gags are in gruesomely bad taste,”
the New York Herald-Tribune
reviewer sniffed — and it’s not hard to figure out which ones he was talking
about.
After The General bombed
at the box office, Schenck put Keaton into a film called College that was a blatant ripoff of Harold Lloyd’s The
Freshman — complete with a big
pole-vaulting scene in which, for the first time in his career, Buster Keaton
had a stunt double — and then made a truly Keatonesque movie called Steamboat
Bill, Jr. with a thrill climax of Keaton
blown wildly about by a storm (inspired by the real Mississippi River floods of
1927 and created on the set by six giant wind machines powered by airplane
motors) that includes the famous scene of the front of a building detaching
itself and falling towards Keaton. He escapes because he’s standing on the spot
where the house has an open window — and given that the house front weighed two
tons, Keaton had to be in exactly the right spot or he’d have been killed for
real. This too was released to disappointing box-office results, so Schenck
decided to place Keaton at MGM — where, in spite of studio interference, he
made two more masterpieces, The Cameraman and Spite Marriage. Then
sound came in, which — unlike Chaplin — Keaton actually welcomed. He was a
gadget freak (the show contains an interview clip with Keaton in which he
recalled that the first time he visited a movie set the first thing he wanted
to do was take apart the camera to see how it functioned) and he’d already done
gags, like the scene set to the song “Asleep in the Deep” in The
Navigator, that are funny as they stand but
would have been even funnier in a sound film. But MGM decided first to make Spite
Marriage a silent with synchronized music
and effects instead of a talkie, and then plunged Keaton into a lumbering
musical called Free and Easy as
his first talking film.
Most of So Funny It Hurt is narrated by Keaton himself, via interviews he
filmed in the last years of his life (when he’d become a respected elder
statesman of comedy), which are fascinating not only in his comments about what
happened to him but also his bitching about other comedians (he regarded the
Marx Brothers as irresponsible and Abbott and Costello as just lazy), including
the ones he wrote gags for when MGM rehired him to write for other performers
in the 1940’s. As Keaton explained it, the big problem with his MGM movies was
that the screenwriters wanted him to do wisecracks, and he pleaded with them to
give him as few lines as possible and let him do long silent sequences in which
he could do the kind of comedy he did best. This really got to be a problem when the “suits” at MGM got the
bright idea of teaming Keaton with Jimmy Durante, who wouldn’t shut up;
Durante’s rapid-fire delivery of verbal comedy just overwhelmed Keaton. As both
his career and his first marriage (to Natalie Talmadge, whose far more famous
sister Norma was Mrs. Joseph Schenck) disintegrated, Keaton sought refuge in
partying and drinking — his dad was an alcoholic and it seems to have run in
the family — though the narrator, James Karen (who actually knew Keaton),
diplomatically avoids making the point that had Keaton been as compulsively
frugal as Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, it’s entirely possible he could
have bought out Joseph Schenck’s interest in the Schenck-Keaton comedy studio
and continued to make his movies independently. Instead he paid for the upkeep
on the lavish “Italian villa” he’d bought for Natalie Talmadge (and put in her
name, with the result that she sold it out from under him, divorced him, got
sole custody of their kids, changed their name from Keaton to Talmadge and had
him arrested at the U.S.-Mexico border when he tried to take them on vacation)
and then moved into what he called his “land yacht,” a converted bus (today it
would be called an R.V.) in which he could live, drink and party, conveniently
parking it on the MGM lot when he was working so he didn’t have to face a
drunken commute.
It’s a familiar and tragic story — though the truth of
Keaton’s decline is considerably more complicated than the version we get here
— which left Keaton blacklisted by Louis B. Mayer and virtually unemployable
(after MGM fired him he’d make two films in Europe, The King of the
Champs-Élysées in France and The
Invader in England, then he returned to the
U.S. for a dreary series of two-reel shorts for Educational and Columbia), though
he occasionally appeared on screen for MGM and other studios (including his
marvelous cameo as a bus driver in Universal’s San Diego, I Love You). Then in 1949 director Robert Z. Leonard asked
Keaton to work out a gag sequence for the film In the Good Old
Summertime in which an actor would take a
pratfall while carrying a violin, breaking the instrument, and Leonard like
Keaton’s demonstration so well he hired him to play the character on screen.
Keaton got to do a local TV series in L.A. recycling his old gags, and
meanwhile the Italian villa was sold to actor James Mason, who looked in a
cupboard behind the projector in the house’s built-in movie theatre and saw a
pile of film reels that turned out to be all Keaton’s silent features and most
of his silent shorts. Mason called in Raymond Rohauer, who was running a
silent-film revival house in L.A., and Rohauer called in Keaton, who went over
the movies and supervised their reissue to a more appreciative audience than
they’d had on their first go-round.
