Buster Keaton: The Scarecrow Saves the Day

If you need to cheer up a grouchy kid (or maybe a grouchy adult), try a small dose of Buster Keaton. I was in exactly that situation recently, with an eleven-year-old boy and a nine-year-old girl who felt like committing mayhem on one another. To restore peace—how I wish this worked as well on world affairs!—I sat them down on the sofa and showed them a 19-minute Keaton short from 1920. The silence was golden, interrupted only by gales of laughter.

 The film was “The Scarecrow.” Set in a rural landscape, it begins with two farmhands, Keaton and a huge hulk of a man named Big Joe Roberts, at home in a tiny one-room cottage. Their living space may be small, but they’ve cleverly engineered it to supply all their needs. What looks at first glance like a living room can quickly be converted into a kitchen: the old-fashioned phonograph cabinet instantly turns into a stove and the bookcase into a refrigerator. With its pillows removed, a settee metamorphoses into a kitchen sink, with the water draining through a pipe to feed a duck pond outside. (The same ingenuity applies to the cottage’s sleeping arrangements: a double bed is also, somehow, a piano.)

 One of many hilarious moments occurs as it’s time to eat dinner at the long table in the center of the cottage. When Joe turns a crank, a host of eating implements (salt and pepper shakers, for instance) descend from the ceiling, attached to long cords. When you’ve finished salting your own food, you simply swing the salt shaker back to your dining partner at the other end of the table. A similar system is handy for removing ice-cold beer bottles from the fridge without having to leave your seat.

 A Keaton film would hardly work without a big chase and a romance. The pretty girl here is the farmer’s daughter, a would-be dancer, who’s quietly sweet on Buster but is also courted by Big Joe. The first big chase (there are several) involves Buster desperately trying to escape from a dog he thinks is rabid because of all the foam around its mouth. (Actually, the dog has just scarfed down a lemon cream pie left on a windowsill to cool.)  And then there’s the sequence in which Buster, with everyone out to get him, manages to pose as a knock-kneed scarecrow—but one capable of taking revenge on offenders who aren’t paying attention.

 It's all good clean fun, but another Keaton short on the same DVD, “The Paleface,” left me more uneasy. In this Wild West tale, the Indians are NOT the bad guys, but they sure aren’t very bright. After they’ve been cruelly swindled by Anglos who are after their land, they vow to take revenge on the first white man who crosses their path. This of course turns out to be Buster, a naïve butterfly hunter. After some amusing confusion, he is duly tied to a stake and a pyre is set ablaze. But when Buster fails to catch fire (you see, he wears these asbestos BVDs), the tribal members fall on their faces and declare him a god. Eventually, the evil white guys get their just deserts, and Buster helps the Indians (played, of course, by overstuffed white guys like Big Joe Roberts) to reclaim their land. And, yes, he wins the pretty Indian maiden too.

 I continue to marvel at Keaton’s skill as a mime and an acrobat. (He also co-wrote and directed.) But making comedy out of the Native Americans’ woes just doesn’t strike me as very funny.

 

Springtime for Hitler . . . and COVID-19

None of us want the current pandemic to kill off our sense of humor. Which is why, sheltering at home, I find myself opting to watch old comedies. Some of them, frankly, turn out to be less funny than I remember. I’ve always revered Carol Burnett: there was a time when I considered her variety show (1967-1978) essential weekly viewing. True, some of the sketches are still very funny: I continue to chuckle at the movie parodies, like the Gone With the Wind spoof in which Scarlett—making an elegant green gown out of the plantation’s velvet drapes—forgets to remove the curtain rod, with disastrous results. But I’ve just looked at clips from The Carol Burnett Show’s first season, and found myself cringing at obvious gags, annoying husband-and-wife bickering, and (in a belabored sketch featuring Sammy Davis Jr.) moments poking fun at racial bigotry in a smug, self-congratulatory way.

For something completely different I turned to a genuine oldie, Buster Keaton’s silent 1924 romp, Sherlock Jr . Keaton’s perennially solemn face and rubber legs have endeared him to generations of comedy lovers. Sherlock Jr. is not as out-and-out hilarious as The General (in which, during the height of the Civil War, his character commandeers a stolen locomotive and drives it through enemy lines). But this story about a movie projectionist who dreams of being a detective is filled with technical sleight-of-hand that has had a profound effect on Hollywood. Keaton’s leading character seems at one point to disappear into a small suitcase. Elsewhere, there’s a dream sequence in which, while Keaton is slumbering next to his movie projector, a second version of himself rises to leave the booth and then climbs directly into the motion picture being projected. Years later, Keaton (who like most of the early comic stars wrote and directed his own material) confided to film historian Kevin Brownlow that "every cameraman in the business went to see that picture more than once, trying to figure out how the hell we did some of that."

 A few nights later, after watching a Mel Brooks documentary, I sought out Brooks’ very first feature, The Producers. Brooks by 1967 had made a name for himself as one of the zany writers on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, as the portrayer of the 2000-Year-Old Man, and as the creator of TV’s Get Smart. His move into movies began with the overtly bizarre idea of a musical celebrating “Springtime for Hitler.” Eventually he launched a story in which an over-the-hill Broadway producer (Zero Mostel) and a babe-in-the-woods accountant (a young Gene Wilder) conspire to raise money for the worst musical ever produced. The logic is that if the show flops bigtime, they can keep the funds they’ve raised. Of course it becomes a huge hit, and they’re royally screwed. 

In 2001 the film (which won fans but garnered mixed reviews) became a genuine Broadway musical, a Tony Award winner starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. Normally movies that are made into stage plays tend to lose their charm and their essence. But in this case the stage version (also written by Brooks) corrected a lot of structural flaws in the original. The long first section of the film—the bonding of the two leading men and their search for a “creative” team—is hilarious. But the film gets derailed when Dick Shawn, as an LSD-addled hippie Hitler-portrayer, bounds in and does his shtick for far longer than we want to watch it. Thereafter, what plot there is falls apart. Brooks in those early years simply didn’t know when to quit.  

Insider fact: Dustin Hoffman, a Greenwich Village neighbor of Mel Brooks back in the day, was offered the role of Franz Liebkind, the playwright nostalgic for the glories of the Third Reich. Hoffman eventually turned it down – to star in The Graduate opposite Anne Bancroft. As Brooks was forced to admit, declining a role in The Producers to make love on camera to Brooks’ beloved new wife was—for Dustin Hoffman--a very smart choice indeed.

Samuel Beckett: Finding Not-So-Happy Days at the Movies

Last weekend my husband and I saw a big-deal production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, staged by James Bundy, the estimable dean of the Yale School of Drama. In the extraordinarily difficult central role, two-time Oscar winner Dianne Wiest was both luminous and heartbreaking, and the physical production could not have been faulted. And yet. And yet. Afterward, my spouse, who knows full well how I like to work my playgoing and filmgoing experiences into blog posts, mentioned that he doubted I’d soon be blogging about Beckett. As always, I’m happy to prove him wrong.

Beckett’s play, which well befits a master of the Theatre of the Absurd, takes place entirely on a bleak dirt mound, which I couldn’t help associating with global warming run amok. To make matters even more ominous, in the first act Wiest’s chatty Winnie is buried up to her waist in dirt. She can gab away; she can greet the day with a smile and a luxurious stretch of her arms; but she can’t leave. Then there’s Act Two: now Winnie is encased in dirt up to her neck. Only her head protrudes to try to find some small crumb of joy in her surroundings. In the long-winded Act One, I admit I got sleepy, though Beckett’s play is so dreamlike (or nightmare-like) that moving in and out of a doze somehow seems like an appropriate response. During Act Two, I stayed fully awake, and the play as a whole left me with a lot to ponder.

Of course no Samuel Beckett play should be taken literally. The 1969 Nobel laureate, author of such classics as Waiting for Godot and Endgame, viewed the human condition with a kind of comic nihilism that has no appeal for many audiences (my long-suffering spouse included). I remember hearing, though, that a traveling production of Godot, in which two tramps bicker while waiting fruitlessly for an important figure who never arrives, was greeted with awed attention at one performance. These particular playgoers were prison inmates, and they knew exactly the mangled emotions—and the feeling of endless, pointless waiting--that Beckett was trying to project. 

Always one to experiment, Beckett sometimes revealed in his plays a strong interest in human interaction with machines. Though he died long before the Age of the Internet, he liked to keep abreast of technological advances. A notable example is 1958’s Krapp’s Last Tape, a short play in which a single character, a man in his sixties, interacts with tapes of his own voice recorded thirty years earlier. And, unlikely as it may seem, Beckett also aspired to direct films, racking up 12 credits for staging short works for the camera. He made his first movie, simply called “Film,” in 1965, with the great Buster Keaton in the silent central role. I’ve heard that Keaton had no idea what the filmmaker was after, but he knew how to take direction, and the result is mesmerizing. In the seventeen minute black-&-white film, Keaton is seen almost  entirely from the rear, enveloped in a heavy black coat, his trademark porkpie hat planted firmly on his head. He scuttles down a wintry urban street as if pursued, and enters his shabby flat where whatever it is he fears still seems to be coming after him. A sense of doom infuses every frame, and Keaton’s mastery of his physical self allows us to share the dread he’s feeling., though an interlude involving two cats is extremely funny. Tension builds, until finally the impending horror stands revealed. But maybe you’d better see it for yourself.