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Joseph Keaton Jr. was born to a knockabout vaudeville family and quickly put on the stage. The lad toured with his family until 1917, when he entered films as second banana to Fatty Arbuckle. In 1920, Keaton left Arbuckle to make his own movies. The medium was still in its infancy; comics were pioneering the craft of making people laugh at moving images. Keaton, it turns out, knew it all-intuitively. His body, honed by vaudeville pratfalls, was a splendid contraption. And as a director, Keaton was born fully mature. He was just 25 then, and as eager to mine the potential for film-flammery as he was to design the wondrous gizmos that make his movies one big notions shop. His ingenuity was utterly American; he had a tinkerer's obsession to learn how things work and how he could make them work to comic effect. This was Keaton's world: everything goes wrong; everything moves perfectly.
Everything, that is, but the girl. His shipmate in The Navigator seems inadvertently bent on drowning Buster every five minutes. And the Southern belle in The General nearly loses the Civil War three years early. Exasperated by her "helpfulness," he impulsively throttles her, then kisses her, then returns to the job at hand. Of all Keaton's females, only one stole his heart: the cow Brown Eyes in Go West.
Buster seemed so solitary, so oblivious to sentiment, that no one could touch him or catch him. The classic Keaton climax is of Buster walking blithely down a Los Angeles street while a herd of women, cops--cows, even--chases after him. And when he is caught, when Boy and Girl end up married, it's not necessarily a happy ending. In the coda to College we see the couple as newlyweds, then as young parents, then as bickering old folks, then as names on their tombstones. Sometimes THE END is the end.
For Keaton the end came abruptly, sadly, in the late '20s. His producer, who was also his brother-in-law, sold him out, literally, to MGM, and Keaton lost control of his films. It was a crash that led to pained obscurity--as second banana to Jimmy Durante, gag writer for Red Skelton, waxwork to Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd., cracked mirror image to Chaplin in the 1952 Limelight. Keaton died at 70 in 1966. He never got to savor the happy ending that film history had planned: the rediscovery and restoration of his films, the flabbergasted smiles of today's children gazing on the Great Stone Face, the influence his work has on movie comics--as both inspiration and reproach.
So watch and marvel. Watch any of the wonderful stunts: balancing on a three-man pyramid in Neighbors, say, or careering over collapsing bridges on the handlebars of a driverless motorcycle in Sherlock Jr. Watch, and see how beautifully the impossible can be made both visible and risible. The wonder is that the same person had the sharp mind to conceive these amazements and the supple body to perform them. When Buster Keaton got them all to work together--his mind, his body, his intelligent love for film--anything was possible.