Sunday, March 16, 2014

The Buster Keaton Story (1957)

Director: Sidney Sheldon                                  Writers: Sidney Sheldon & Robert Smith
Film Score: Victor Young                                  Cinematography: Loyal Griggs
Starring: Donald O’Connor, Ann Blyth, Rhonda Fleming and Peter Lorre

The Buster Keaton Story is a train wreck of a film. Every single solitary thing in the film is a lie. Even worse, though, is that it makes one of the most wonderful human beings ever to grace the screen into something he never was: a loser. Keaton had his ups and downs to be sure, and the downside was considerable, but he never felt sorry for himself and he never doubted his own talent. This film makes him out to be an idiot, something else Keaton never was. If you want to see the real Keaton in all his glory, I cannot recommend highly enough the BBC series Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow. This three part miniseries tells the story of his life with incredible reverence and accuracy, the story of an everyman comedian who is impossible not to fall in love with. This film, on the other hand, is such a complete distortion of that life that it leaves nothing left of the truth with which it supposedly began.

To detail all of the inaccuracies of the film it would be necessary to go over every single shot, but I’ll make it as brief as I can. The film begins with his parents in a vaudeville road show with Buster part of the act as a child, getting big laughs when he falls off a table and is knocked out cold. This is probably the most realistic part of the story, but it only lasts a few minutes. The film then has Buster going to Hollywood in 1920, sneaking his way onto the lot and demanding to direct his own pictures. Nothing of the sort ever happened. In 1917 Buster went to work with Fatty Arbuckle in New York City and spent three years with the comedian doing everything from stunts, to extra work, to co-starring. His first feature didn’t come about until 1920, but in The Saphead, replacing Douglas Fairbanks who had played the role on stage. Only with the success of that film did Joseph Schenck, Buster’s brother-in-law, then give Keaton his own unit to make shorts.

A couple of gags from his shorts are recreated, though inexplicably they use different names for the films, but his features are barely mentioned at all and only then in headlines in Variety. Most of the picture focuses on an asinine pursuit of a famous movie actress, Rhonda Fleming, who looks more like Marilyn Monroe in the film than a twenties starlet. Meanwhile, a studio assistant, Ann Blyth, falls head over heels for Donald O’Connor as Keaton and yet he completely ignores her. She even marries him while he’s in a drunken haze--all off camera, of course--and stands by his side while he is broke and out of work, another lie since he was always working for small studios because of his reputation and never walked the streets destitute. In actuality Keaton first married Natalie Talmadge and had two sons with her, and it was after this marriage that he built his giant mansion in Beverly Hills. He married Mae Scriven during his alcoholic binge, and finally Eleanor Norris whom Blyth is supposed to represent.

As I said in my review of Chaplin, it’s almost impossible to impersonate a famous silent screen star. O’Connor does all right at mimicking some of Keaton’s physicality, but in no way does he remind anyone of Buster Keaton. And while the film is supposedly set in the twenties and thirties, it all looks pretty much like the fifties, from the phony sound stages to the residential Hollywood streets, to the insipid TV-style direction by Sidney Sheldon. The female characters are straight out of a fifties soap opera, and Peter Lorre is the most improbable director of comedies one could ever think of. Unlike Man of a Thousand Faces from the same year, in which Lon Chaney’s story was romanticized but much of his actual story still kept intact, this film is so false, and feels so false, that it has almost nothing to recommend it. The one positive thing The Buster Keaton Story did, however, was to pay for Keaton’s “ranch” in Woodland Hills where he spend the remainder of what he called, “a good life.” As great as Buster Keaton was, that’s how bad this film is.

2 comments:

  1. I saw this on Amazon but had serious reservations about. Thanks for the confirmation. I'll skip this one.

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  2. You're welcome. Normally there's a certain curiosity value in old biopics like this one. But this is just a travesty. I think I watched it on YouTube and was absolutely appalled. I'm sure you must have seen A Hard Act to Follow, but if not, it is brilliant.

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