COURSODON: The end of The Blacksmith is more grist to Brad’s mill: Buster and The Girl (the romance’s buildup is extremely flimsy) hop on a train, fleeing Buster’s boss and irate customers. Intertitle: “Many a honeymoon express has ended thusly.” Shot of a toy electric train running over some trestles, derailing and falling off. Shot of a nursery room with The Girl and Buster married. He fixes up the toy train, walks toward the camera yawning and pulls down a shade that bears the words “The End”.
STEVENS: The Blacksmith is a return to the more primitive style of Arbuckle’s films, with which it shares a child-like celebration of the joys of destruction (particularly when what is being destroyed is an expensive car that can be seen as standing in for the social ambitions Keaton’s wife Natalie Talmadge was apparently encouraging him to demonstrate). The satirical treatment of macho ideals is quite effective (especially in the opening shots), but the film is more interesting for what it tries to avoid than for anything it actually does. For most of its length, Buster is portrayed as a man without any kind of sexual desire, his proposal and relationship being introduced during the final moments in a manner which underlines its sheer perfunctoriness (and in certain ways anticipates the finale of North by Northwest). Given the problematic nature of Keaton’s marriage, it is tempting to read The Blacksmith as an expression of nostalgic yearning for simpler times… and simpler films.
COURSODON: Well, why should he be portrayed as having sexual desires when he is so busy working?… There’s a time for work and there’s a time for sex and romance. The surprising thing is the total carelessness with which the romance is introduced at the very end. Even in a slapstick comedy it’s strange to see the haughty rich girl whose white horse Buster has thoroughly besmirched and bespattered with dirty oil and grime suddenly fall for this clumsy assistant mechanic and pass him a love note. The little routine in which he pretends to spurn her, throws away the note, then frantically searches for it in the hay after she hesitantly leaves is delightful but completely arbitrary and unprepared. (As the new intertitle for Moonshine has it: “This is a two-reeler, we don’t have time to build up to love scenes.”) I think Keaton put in that last-minute romance because he wanted his closing gag with the honeymoon express derailing. Of course his own honeymoon express was already off the track.
SALLITT: The destruction is my favourite part of this film. There’s something wickedly funny about the way that Keaton’s carelessness toward the Rolls-Royce quickly escalates into criminal negligence. And for some reason I find the careening engine hilarious. Keaton seems to have a special knack for comedy with very large objects, where the physical scale of the stunt is funny in itself.
On the whole, though, The Blacksmith strikes me as one of the least interesting Keaton shorts. After a string of conceptually ambitious projects, this one seems like a real throwback.
COURSODON: And although a throwback of sorts (“of sorts” because it doesn’t really look like an Arbuckle) the film is still thoroughly Keatonian. The early gag with the eggs and the one with the watch are superb. The dirtying of everything clean is profoundly Arbucklean of course, but dealt with in a decidely Keatonian twist. Buster is inept but not deliberately destructive. He does his best. He concentrates on fixing up the old Model T, not realising that he is soiling the beautiful car in the process — but there’s a sweetness about his fixation on the old wreck.
The knack for comedy with very large objects will of course triumph in the features: The Navigator, The General, Steamboat Bill, Jr…
STEVENS: The Frozen North is surely Keaton’s most surreal film. It ends by asserting that the entire “narrative” had actually been something Buster was dreaming after falling asleep in a cinema. But such “it was all a dream” endings are far from new for Keaton, and Buster’s uncharacteristic behaviour is not that dissimilar to his cynical opportunism in The ‘High Sign’.
Among this short’s chief delights is a fantasy image (another cinephile reference to set alongside the Méliès tributes in The Haunted House and The Playhouse) of Buster as Erich von Stroheim.
COURSODON: Despite many fine gags this short sort of misfires because parody in a dream context doesn’t really work, the two tending to get in each other’s way. Somehow the logic in the madness is missing.
SALLITT: Well, the dream is just an afterthought — until the last ten seconds, it’s all parody and no dream.
I’ve gone back and forth on The Frozen North, feeling at times that the parody drained all the feeling out of Keaton’s universe. But, on the plus side, Keaton seems pretty sharp and creative here from beginning to end, as if the snow setting gave him a surplus of new comic ideas. Landscape counts for a lot in Keaton’s films, and I get a good feeling as soon as Keaton emerges from the “last stop on the subway” and starts stumbling around in the emptiness. The new sets lead to new jokes as well — like the igloo where you can’t lean back against the wall, or the heavy wooden door that doesn’t open in the direction that Keaton expects.
One of my very favourite Keaton gags occurs here, in the ice-fishing scene, where Keaton’s line gets tangled with the other fisherman’s. It’s a mathematics gag, and Keaton establishes the ground rules in that sustained long shot in which one pole goes up as the other goes down. When Keaton reels in his line, the tension is exquisite, because the math promises an impossible result — which then happens.
COURSODON: And here he is quoting/spoofing Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922) which was released only two months before The Frozen North, but had a long history and had been filmed two years before.
I should also note that the dream is not an afterthought. It retroactively “justifies” the total absurdity and nonsense of much of what happens in the film. It’s like Keaton telling the audience: “You thought I was being silly and making no sense at all, but see, it was a dream, and in dreams anything can happen.” He does quite a few things in that film that he would never have done in other films, and the dream is the rationale for it.
SALLITT: Are we likely to mistake The Frozen North, or any other Keaton film, for reality if he omits the dream framework? The dream serves the purpose of providing some consistency for the Buster character across different movies, which was probably important to him. But, other than that, I can’t see that the dream does anything to adjust the level of absurdity.
COURSODON: It’s not so much the level of absurdity as the nature of the absurdity. Keaton kept saying in interviews that he didn’t want to be “too ridiculous”, by which he meant totally absurd (he also said that he avoided “impossible” gags, which comes to about the same thing). As I said before, sometimes there’s logic in the madness, and sometimes not. I don’t see the dream device in The Frozen North as intended to provide consistency to the character in relation to his other films, if that’s what you mean, although it may happen to also serve that purpose. Granted that no Keaton film is to be mistaken for reality, but there are different ways in which slapstick comedy rearranges the real for its own purposes. Most of the gags in most of his films are not in contradiction with the laws of nature and could, theoretically, “happen” in reality, although the likelihood of any of them actually happening is extremely remote. (There are no gags in nature; a gag has to be constructed.) Again, in The Frozen North Keaton pushes the absurd further than in his other films. He wouldn’t have used the subway entrance or the taxi-sledge or the murders in other films. There are very few truly “impossible” gags in his films. In The ‘High Sign’ he draws a hook on the wall and then hangs his hat on it — an animated cartoon kind of nonsense gag, but such gags are very rare in Keaton, and this was his first personal short (and he was displeased with it!).
STEVENS: Let’s not forget Buster’s descent to China (and reemergence with a Chinese family) at the end of Hard Luck, a gag Keaton seems to have been particularly proud of. There’s also the elevator bursting through the roof at the end of The Goat, Buster being posted home as if he were a parcel in Daydreams (1922), etc.
COURSODON: True. But they were all closing gags. Keaton felt he could indulge in a bit of nonsense before taking leave of the audience.
Actually his nonsense gags are delicious — I particularly like the propeller of the weird taxi cab which, once inverted, causes the vehicle to move backward — and are not the reason why the film as a whole misfires. I tend to agree with Robinson on this: “The device of making the central character a take-off of another character simply doesn’t work. The hero has no sort of consistency, either as a Keaton character or as a sustained parody figure.”
SALLITT: It’s rather striking that the villainous Keaton not only tries to abduct the woman (as he did in his perfunctory bad-guy role in The Butcher Boy), but, if I read the movie conventions correctly, actually rapes her. The whole movie conveys the feeling of id triumphant, of a playful opportunity to let hostile undertones become overtones. Unlike Arbuckle, Keaton comes across to me as a nice guy, even when he exposes his antisocial impulses.
STEVENS: Keaton was always burying the old Buster and moving on… then beginning the process all over again. It’s part of the way in which his films function, this constant oscillation between ceaseless movement and death (the ultimate halt to all movement). Even suicide can only ever be provisional: it’s one option among many, and not even a particularly consequential one.
Certainly the shorts he made around the time of his marriage are more than usually preoccupied with summing up and suicide. Daydreams is essentially an anthology of themes and routines from the earlier films, while Hard Luck (which precedes the marriage) contains several suicide attempts. The climaxes of both Hard Luck and Daydreams, as well as those of Cops and The Electric House, involve suicide attempts. (The one in Cops is actually successful.) In each case, Buster is driven to suicide after being rejected by the girl he loves (or being rejected by the girl’s father, which amounts to the same thing). Yet the sheer casualness of these suicide attempts connects with Keaton’s desire to satirise ideals of sexual exclusivity. We never feel that Buster’s heart has been genuinely broken, that he really has no option but to end his life. For Buster, one woman will do as well as another, which is what makes his endless series of romantically motivated suicides so funny.
SALLITT: The suicide in Daydreams is grimmer than any of the others, isn’t it? His humiliation in front of his girl is quite uncomfortable; and he looks stricken enough to be sincere as he stands alone with the gun and raises it to his head. Of course, jokes ensue… but this is in a different category than the other, completely facetious suicide references.
Daydreams isn’t a particular favourite of mine. Unlike The Blacksmith, this one might suffer from an excess of ambition: I think Keaton wanted to try something new with the epistolary, multi-part format, but it has the effect for me of preventing the film from accumulating any narrative or formal momentum. Maybe it’s not a great idea to make a film about a series of whoppers that you’re telling your girlfriend — the insincerity seems to permeate the project. There are certainly some good moments, like the claustrophobic chaos of that Wall Street election speech that goes up in flames, and the deadly black humour of the cops on the fire escape being swallowed by the earth. And I’m amazed by that shot where Keaton is pulled parallel to the ground by the speed of the trolley car that he is hanging onto.
STEVENS: Most prints of Daydreams are missing three sequences depicting Buster’s fantasies of success as a surgeon, on the stock exchange, and as a police official. Some earlier prints partially restored these scenes through the use of still frames.
COURSODON: They are not exactly Buster’s fantasies of success — they are the fantasies of his girlfriend who reads his letters from the big city and misunderstands their admittedly ambiguous phrasing (e.g.: “On Wall Street I have been cleaning up in a big way” — she imagines him as a wealthy capitalist in a top hat; actually he is a sanitation worker). The fact that all the “fantasy” sequences were removed suggests that someone may have constructed another short using only them.
Next: The Final Three Shorts: The Electric House, The Balloonatic, & The Love Nest
A Roundtable on Buster Keaton's Short Films 