The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (220 page)

East of Eden
is Kazan’s best film: partly because of Dean’s prickly hesitation; partly because the absorbing clash of acting styles (Dean and Raymond Massey) suited Steinbeck’s high-class weepie novel; and also because Cinema Scope seemed to stimulate Kazan into treating his camera with some of the emphatic care he lavished on actors.
Baby Doll
, while always a minor chamber play, is atmospheric and catches the tender humor of Williams.
A Face in the Crowd
was the conscience-stricken radical, crudely manhandling the media and unable to deal with an intransigent chief actor.
Wild River
is the concerned American thinking and feeling in unison, a more speculative film than Kazan usually allowed himself, subtle in its situation, its coloring, and its acting.
Splendor in the Grass
, however, is intense to the point of hysteria, the most extreme instance of Kazan’s emotional involvement with his characters, the source of all that is vital and most alarming in his work. As a result, it is a violent film, lurching between great beauty (especially in Natalie Wood’s performance) and excess.

At this stage, Kazan grew reflective on his own life.
America America
was based on his novel, as was
The Arrangement
, a very obvious commentary on materialism in America. Sadly, the defects of that film seem to Kazan its greatest virtues. The novels he wrote in the sixties and seventies were solidly second-rate, overwritten, and under-thought. They showed how banal the energy of a director could seem on the page. But in the woeful
Last Tycoon
, Kazan had lost his essential energy.

After 1980, he had appeared occasionally in documentaries about Greece or the Actors Studio. But his largest venture was the writing of his lengthy, controversial, and fascinating
A Life
. The autobiography is far and away his best book, destructively candid and boastful about his treatment of women, but a lasting work to be put beside his best films and his enormous glamorization of the American actor. For good and ill, this is one of the key lives in American theatre arts. But when the Academy gave him an honorary Oscar, in 1999, all the old enmities sprang up—and Kazan refused the chance of apologizing. He had lived as he died, on his own feelings.

Buster Keaton
(Joseph Francis Keaton) (1895–1966), b. Pickway, Kansas
1920:
The High Sign; One Week; Convict 13; The Scarecrow; Neighbors
. 1921:
The Haunted House; Hard Luck
(all codirected with Eddie Cline);
The Goat
(codirected with Malcolm St. Clair);
The Playhouse; The Boat; The Paleface
. 1922:
Cops; My Wife’s Relations
(all codirected with Cline);
The Blacksmith
(codirected with St. Clair);
The Frozen North; The Electric House; Daydreams; Balloonatics
(all codirected with Cline);
Our Hospitality
(codirected with John Blystone). 1924:
Sherlock Jr.; The Navigator
(codirected with Donald Crisp). 1925:
Seven Chances; Go West
. 1926:
Battling Butler; The General
(codirected with Clyde Bruckman).

Keaton strikes a chord with the world of post-1960 that was not heard when his greatest films were made. It has been argued, with justice, that his films are “beautiful,” which means that their comedy is expressed in photography that is creative, witty, and excited by the appearance of things. That sounds obvious, but most comedy films of the silent era did little more than film the comedian’s “act.” Even Chaplin tended to plonk the camera in a good seat in the stalls. But in Keaton’s films there is an extraordinary use of space in the jokes that is faithfully and beautifully recorded:
Go West
is a masterpiece of the moving camera; in
The Navigator
the ship is a deserted, and nearly haunted, house.
The General
has the topographical vividness of an Anthony Mann film; and that dissolve in
Seven Chances
from a church empty but for Buster to one crowded out with hopeful women is typical of Keaton’s instinct for interiors. It remains something of a puzzle as to how far that design was conscious. Nothing suggests such thoughtful talent among Keaton’s various collaborators: but nothing significantly detracts from the visual consistency of the films from
The Three Ages
to
The General;
and yet descriptions of Keaton on set, and the story of his ruin, seem to indicate a haphazard working style that put great strains on those different codirectors.

Perhaps the explanation is Keaton’s pleasure in authenticity and the way in which his own supercilious screen persona dominated the direction. Unlike Chaplin, who tended to reinvent the world of Victorian melodrama, and unlike those comics who merely dressed up vaudeville routines, Keaton conceived of films as specifically American. In this, he seems to have had the notion of parodying current American cinema and an awareness of American landscape more usual in the Western.
The General, Our Hospitality, Go West
, and
Steamboat Bill Jr
. are all fond evocations of period and place. Similarly, the railroad in
The General
is real and the train’s maneuvers credible and dangerous. It is well known that Keaton performed personally in scenes that involved considerable risk. In
Our Hospitality
there is the waterfall sequence, while in
Sherlock Jr
. Keaton had a fall that, years later, it was discovered, had broken his neck. Such physical peril did not make him a slapstick artist. On the contrary, his reactions when threatened were untheatrical and near mystical in his haughty recognition of a malign fate and the deadpan that might honorably confront it.

That is what strikes us today as the most admirable thing about Keaton: the serene capacity for absorbing frustration and turning a blind eye to fear and failure. If Chaplin’s films are always working toward self-centered pathos, Keaton never disguises the element of absurdity in a lone romantic’s dealings with the world. Those repeated attempts by directors and producers to make Keaton smile on screen were contrary not just to the screen persona of a commercial property but to Keaton’s knowledge that there never was or would be much to smile at.

Few people ever recognized that Keaton’s impassivity was to save him from crying. In maudlin, self-reflective close-up, Chaplin wept in crises. Keaton is the more profound artist because he was not beguiled into comfort by his own self-pity. He saw that the conscientious, humorless hero he played must prove himself by facing frustrations and disasters without ever cracking.

The General
is not only a comedy but a genuinely heroic film. Buster’s troubles with trains in that film are based on Keaton’s own inquisitive interest in machinery. It was a matter of art that his own handyman’s fascination was translated on film into a Quixotic bewilderment with machinery. Thus I would swap all of
Modern Times
for that glorious moment in
The General
when Buster’s meditation fails to notice the growing motion of the engine’s drive shaft on which he is sitting. That illustrates the character of the dreamer so brilliantly revealed in his masterpiece,
Sherlock Jr.
, about a cinema projectionist who dreams his way into a movie. Only an artist aware of the complex appeal to fantasy in cinema could have conceived
Sherlock Jr.
, the most philosophically eloquent of silent comedies.

The best films antedate the tragedy of his life and thereby make irrelevant the question of whether his art and his terrible decline were connected. In his book on Keaton, Rudi Blesh chose to describe that ruin as a Keaton scenario that Buster accepted with calm, self-destructive passivity. The truth seems to me more confused. Keaton provoked his own disaster, partly because he was a sketchy businessman, partly because the screen character was far from his real personality. Offscreen he seems to have been brash, noisy, and impulsive. That may rule out the neatness of Blesh’s interpretation, but it adds to our idea of Keaton as an artist capable of inventing a screen character.

Keaton was the son of a vaudeville partnership; he entered the family act at the age of three and stayed with it nearly twenty years. It was in 1917 that he joined Fatty Arbuckle at Comique and played a string of shorts directed by Fatty:
The Butcher Boy
(17);
Rough House
(17);
His Wedding Night
(17);
The Bell Boy
(18);
Goodnight Nurse
(18);
Moonshine
(18);
The Cook
(18);
A Desert Hero
(19);
Backstage
(19);
A Country Hero
(19);
The Garage
(19). He moved to Metro and made more shorts, as his own director, as well as one feature,
The Saphead
(20, Winchell Smith). In 1923, he made the first of his sequence of features,
The Three Ages
, and married Natalie Talmadge, the sister-in-law of Joseph Schenck.

Schenck managed Keaton. They produced films together for MGM to distribute, until in 1926 Schenck joined United Artists. Keaton had to tag along and
The General, College
(27, James Horne), and
Steamboat Bill Jr
. (28, Charles Reisner) were made for UA. Was the appearance of separate directors a foreshadowing of what was to happen? In 1928, Joseph Schenck calmly transferred Buster to his brother Nicholas Schenck at MGM. It seems that Keaton was arbitrarily cut off from the revenue of his earlier films and sold into the unsympathetic hands of a giant corporation.

With Joseph Schenck he had had his own unit, and his ideas had been allowed to flower by trial and error as films went along. MGM wanted complete, plot-heavy scripts in advance, proper schedules, and safe men to supervise Keaton. The arrangement foundered. If, as he said later, Keaton had predicted that, then he ought to have extricated himself when there was still time. MGM, equally, should have been more generous to his proven working methods, if only because he was a major money-spinner and one of the few silent comedians stimulated by sound.

Perhaps the studio disliked independence per se, perhaps they marked Keaton down as representative of a bygone age, but it is also true that Keaton cracked personally. He drank heavily and his marriage broke up. His films at MGM deteriorated steadily:
The Cameraman
(28, Edward Sedgwick);
Spite Marriage
(29, Sedgwick);
Free and Easy
(30, Sedgwick);
Doughboys
(30, Sedgwick);
Speak Easily
(31, Sedgwick);
Sidewalks of New York
(31, Jules White and Zion Myers);
Parlor, Bedroom and Bath
(32, Sedgwick);
The Passionate Plumber
(32, Sedgwick); and
What, No Beer?
(33, Sedgwick). In 1933, he was divorced and fired by MGM; he was also seriously injured in a fall incurred during an alcoholic stupor.

He never recovered. He went to Europe for two films—
Le Roi des Champs-Elysées
(34, Max Nosseck) and
An Old Spanish Custom
(35, Adrian Brunel), but needed frequent treatment and recuperation. From 1934–47 he made some comedy shorts for Educational; and between 1939–41 he did the same at Columbia. But he worked mainly thereafter as gagman or bit part actor, a ravaged version of the angelic Pierrot he had been: he worked on the stories of
The Jones Family in Hollywood
(39, St. Clair) and
The Jones Family in Quick Millions
(39, St. Clair); contributed gags for Red Skelton to
Bathing Beauty
(44, George Sidney),
Neptune’s Daughter
(49, Edward Buzzell), and
A Southern Yankee
(49, Sedgwick); and appeared in
San Diego I Love You
(44, Reginald Le Borg);
That Night With You
(45, William A. Seiter); to Mexico for
El Moderno Barba Azul
(46, Jaime Salvador);
You’re My Everything
(49, Walter Lang);
In the Good Old Summertime
(49, Robert Z. Leonard);
The Lovable Cheat
(49, Richard Oswald); playing bridge (a game he loved) in
Sunset Boulevard
(50, Billy Wilder);
Limelight
(52, Chaplin);
Around the World in 80 Days
(56, Michael Anderson);
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
(63, Stanley Kramer);
The Rail-rodder
(65, Gerald Potterton), a Canadian short in homage to his 1920s character;
Film
(65, Alan Schneider), a turgid exercise derived from Samuel Beckett; and
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
(66, Richard Lester).

Diane Keaton
(Diane Hall), b. Los Angeles, 1946
1987:
Heaven
(d). 1990: “Fever,” an episode of
China Beach
(TV);
The Girl with the Crazy Brother
(s). 1991: “Slaves and Masters,” an episode of
Twin Peaks; Wildflower
. 1995:
Unstrung Heroes
. 1999:
Mother’s Helper
. 2000:
Hanging Up
. 2001:
Pasadena
(TV).

Diane Keaton won her Oscar in
Annie Hall
(77, Woody Allen) doing … so little, if you come to think about it, that the award must have been tribute to her likability and to the amiable, cool tolerance exhibited by her character. “Annie Hall” was nearly an-ism in the late seventies, a way of dressing, reacting, and feeling. When people fall in love with an idea, they don’t bother to check how much substance it has. Being Woody Allen’s best girl then seemed a very hip role; and Keaton was so deadpan cute in her basic attitudes, no matter that her way of talking became as jittery as Woody’s. Even that had an edge of parody to it. She had been with Allen in
Play It Again, Sam
(72, Herbert Ross),
Sleeper
(73, Allen), and
Love and Death
(75, Allen), but in
Annie Hall
it was as if her real self had emerged. Everyone felt good about her.