Neighbors (Joseph M. Schenck Productions, Metro Pictures Corporation, 1920)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The 1920 film Neighbors was a 20-minute short, an early entry in the Buster Keaton canon – made while producer Joseph M. Schenck was still putting his first name in quotes, as “Buster” Keaton. The name originally came from Harry Houdini, who was once on the same vaudeville bill as Keaton and his parents, who had an act called “The Three Keatons.” Houdini saw young Keaton take a big fall on stage and called out, “That was a real buster” – and the name stuck. Eventually Keaton’s parents started billing the act as “The Three Keatons, Featuring Buster, the Human Mop.” At one time the act ran afoul of the Gerry Society, an organization formed to stop the exploitation of child performers on stage. The Gerry Society filed a complaint against Joe Keaton, Buster’s father, saying that he was endangering his son’s life every time they performed the act. Buster saved himself from an orphanage and his parents from prison by performing the act in court and convincing the judge that, however life-threatening it looked on stage, he was a fully trained acrobat and he was in no real danger.

I mention this in connection with Neighbors because it’s a Romeo and Juliet-style plot in which two young lovers (Buster Keaton and Virginia Fox, later Mrs. Darryl F. Zanuck) who live next door to each other are being kept apart by the enmity of their parents, particularly their fathers – and Buster Keaton’s father in the film is played by Joe Keaton, his father in real life. At one point, Buster Keaton tries to see his girlfriend by climbing up her building’s fire escape, in an obvious parody of the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene, and he takes a few tumbles that, like his old stage act with his parents, look life-threatening but really aren’t. (Unfortunately, Buster Keaton inherited something else from his dad – alcoholism – and as his marriage fell apart and he lost control of his career to the “suits” at MGM, he responded by drinking more and losing the superb coordination he had once had, which forced him to use stunt doubles.) There are audacious scenes in which Keaton is carried across the courtyard that separates his and his girlfriend’s buildings on top of two other men – they may be the “Flying Escalantes” mysteriously listed in the credits on imdb.com – and it all ends as happily as one would expect. Neighbors was co-written and co-directed by Buster Keaton and Eddie Cline, a former Keystone Kop who’s also in this movie – as, what else? a police officer) and who would go on to direct W. C. Fields’ last three starring vehicles at Universal in 1940 and 1941: My Little Chickadee, The Bank Dick and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. Like A Night in the Show in Chaplin’s filmography, Neighbors is a minor entry in Keaton’s, but it’s still amazing and screamingly funny.