Add
Private Notes
The new material runs for over four minutes, and involves novel jokes, characters, and settings that differ from the widely distributed version of the film available from Kino-Lorber. For example, the Virginia Fox character now has a father who makes an appearance, while Buster and Big Joe Roberts chase each other around a small set, barely more than a shed, designated as the local “Chamber of Commerce.” Buster also attempts to propose to Virginia, pleading he won’t always be a blacksmith, which makes more plausible their elopement later in the film.
One of the most revered comedies of the silent era, this film finds hapless Southern railroad engineer Johnny Gray (Buster Keaton) facing off against Union soldiers during the American Civil War. When Johnny's fiancée, Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack), is accidentally taken away while on a train stolen by Northern forces, Gray pursues the soldiers, using various modes of transportation in comic action scenes that highlight Keaton's boundless wit and dexterity.
A series about the life, career and works of the movie comedy genius.
Biography
Take A Tour of Buster Keaton's Studio back in the Day.
Customers and clerks frolic in a general store. Roscoe walks out of the freezer wearing a fur coat, then does some clever cleaver tossing. In Buster's film debut he buys a pail of molasses.
Roscoe, his wife and his mother-in-law run a seaside resort. Buster plays a gardener who puts out a fire started by Roscoe, then a delivery boy who fights with the cook St. John, then a cop.
In a drugstore Al and Roscoe are rivals for Alice. Roscoe slings melons and operates the gas pump. Buster delivers a wedding gown for Alice, begins modeling it, is mistaken for Alice and is kidnapped by Al.
Roscoe is a doctor who falls in love with a pretty woman whose boyfriend, in turn, falls in love with Roscoe's wife's jewelry.
Roscoe tries to dump his wife so he can enjoy the beach attractions. Buster arrives with Alice who is taken away from him by Al who loses her to Roscoe. Bathing beauties and Keystone Kops abound.
This short is a lost silent film so it doesn't exist.
A satire of western movies. Roscoe comes into town after riding the rails. The saloon has a trap door over a pit where bodies are tossed as they are shot. A black patron is taunted and shot at. Roscoe and Buster do everything they can to keep Al from Alice.
At the Elk's Head Hotel bellhops torment the lobby, each other and guests. The elevator is powered by a stubborn horse. A sham robbery turns into a real one. And there is a chase on a runaway trolley.
A feud between the Owens and the Gillettes ends when the last remaining Gillette is killed, but new trouble erupts for the mountain folk with the arrival of a U.S. revenue agent and his assistant. The revenuers search high and low for the secret hideaway where the mountain people prepare illegal alcohol, but end up in deep trouble that only a little movie magic can save them from.
Roscoe's wife wants him committed to the No Hope Sanitarium for a cure from drink. He is greeted by blood spattered, cleaver-wielding Buster and a barely clad female patient. He eats a thermometer and must be rushed into surgery.
Cooks make hovoc in seaside resort hotel.
Roscoe and Buster are working at a vaudeville house. When the crew attacks the strongman for bullying his assistant, the man goes out on strike so the crew puts on a show. When the strongman starts shooting from the balcony, Buster rigs a swing, picks him up, and takes him to the stage where is again subdued.
Buster manages the store while Roscoe delivers the mail, taking time out for hide-and-seek with Molly. The constable, also interested in Molly, steals $300 while being observed by Buster.
Roscoe and Buster operate a combination garage and fire station. In the first half they destroy a car left for them to clean. In the second half they go off on a false alarm and return to find their own building on fire.
Two newlyweds receive a build-it-yourself house as a wedding gift. The house can be built, supposedly, in "one week". A rejected suitor secretly re-numbers packing crates. The movie recounts Keaton's struggle to assemble the house according to this new "arrangement". The end result is depicted in the picture. As if this weren't enough, Keaton finds he has built his house on the wrong site and has to move it. The movie reaches its tense climax when the house becomes stuck on railroad tracks. Keaton and Seely try to move it out the way of an oncoming train, which eventually passes on the neighboring track. As the couple look relieved, the house is immediately struck and demolished by another train coming the other way. Keaton stares at the scene, places a 'For Sale' sign with the heap (attaching the building instructions) and walks off with Seely.
Keaton goes from a golf game with his girlfriend to death-row in prison through a case of mistaken identity. In the film, Buster performs one of the most dangerous sight gags that he performed in vaudeville. In the words of Marie Dressler: Buster would "stand on a table in back of his father twirling a basketball tied to the end of a rope, while his father was trying to shave himself with a straight razor. And that ball kept getting closer and closer, all the sudden, BANG!"
Buster plays a farmhand who competes with Joe Roberts to win the love of the farmer's daughter (Sybil Seely). Running from a dog (played by Luke, Fatty Arbuckle's real-life pet), Buster falls into a hay thresher and ruins his clothes. Forced to borrow the clothes of a nearby scarecrow, Sybil believes Buster to be proposing as she stumbles upon him tying his shoe. The couple speed off on a motorcycle with Joe and the farmer (played by Buster's father, Joe) in hot pursuit. Scooping up a minister during the chase, they are married on the speeding motorcycle and splash into a stream at the climax of the ceremony and the film.
Buster Keaton and Virginia Fox play young lovers who live in tenements, the rear of which face each other, with backyards separated by a wooden fence. Their families feud over the lovers' relationship, resulting in much mayhem and slapstick.
Buster Keaton is a bank teller who becomes involved in a hold-up, counterfeiters, and a theatrical troupe posing as spooks in a haunted house. The film ends with a famous sequence of Keaton ascending to heaven, and then descending to Hades.
Buster plays a down on his luck young man who decides to commit suicide after losing his job and his girl. After several inept attempts to end his life - and bolstered by whiskey disguised as poison - he joins an expedition to capture an armadillo. Buster finds himself becoming more confident through a series of adventures (such as fishing and fox hunting) as the film proceeds. The confidence becomes his undoing as he misses the pool in a dive from a high board and hits the ground on the far side with such force that he disappears into a hole. Some years later, an Asian-garbed Buster climbs out of the hole in the now dry and deserted pool followed by a Chinese wife and two young children.
Buster plays a drifter who cons his way into working at an amusement park shooting gallery. Believing Buster is an expert marksman, both the murderous gang the Blinking Buzzards and the man they want to kill end up hiring him. The film ends with a wild chase through a house filled with secret passages.
Buster Keaton is walking by and peers through a barred window while captured murderer "Dead Shot Dan" is having his picture taken. Seeing that the photographer is looking away, Dan moves his head to the side and snaps a picture of Buster without anybody noticing. Thus, when Dan escapes, the wanted posters all show Buster with his hands on the bars. Buster is chased by various policemen, including a persistent Police Chief. Despite his desperate predicament, Buster notices a pretty young woman and wrangles an invitation to dinner, only to discover her father is the Police Chief. This short contains one of Keaton's more memorable images: A distant, speeding train approaches the camera, and stops with a close-up of Keaton who has been sitting on the front of the train.
The film is set up as a series of humorous tricks on the audience, with constant doubling, and in which things are rarely what they at first seem to be. It opens with Keaton attending a variety show. In this first sequence, Keaton plays beside him and remarks, "This fellow Keaton seems to be the whole show." This was a gibe at one of Keaton's contemporaries, Thomas Ince, who credited himself generously in his film productions. In interviews with Kevin Brownlow. Keaton claims he gave the director's credit to Cline mainly because he did not want to appear too Ince-like himself: "Having kidded things like that, I hesitated to put my own name on as a director and writer." This elaborate trick-photography sequence turns out to be only a dream when Joe Roberts rouses Keaton from bed. The bedroom then turns out to be not a bedroom, but a set on a stage. The second half of the film features Keaton's character falling for a girl who happens to be a twin. He has difficulty telling the twin who likes him from the one who does not. An uncredited Virginia Fox plays one of the twins. Edward F. Cline co-wrote the production and appears, uncredited, as a monkey trainer, whose monkey Keaton impersonates onstage after accidentally letting the animal escape.
Buster is married with two children (both of whom wear the porkpie hat made famous by Keaton). He has built a large boat he has christened Damfino inside his home. When he finishes and decides to take it out to sea, he discovers it is too large to fit through the door. Buster enlarges the opening, but when he tows the boat out, it brushes the side and his house collapses. Buster loses his car in attempting to launch the boat. While out on the Pacific, Buster and his family are caught in a terrible storm. The boat is barely seaworthy to begin with, and he does not help matters when he nails a picture to the side of the hull, or when he drills a hole in the bottom for an outlet for the resulting leak. He radios for help, but when the navy or coast guard operator asks who it is, he answers, "Damfino." The man interprets it as "damn if I know" and dismisses the call. Taking to a dinghy, Buster and his family wash up on a deserted beach. "Where are we?" asks his wife, to which Buster replies, "Damfino."
A butterfly collector unwittingly wanders into an Indian encampment while chasing a butterfly. This tribe has resolved to kill the first white man who enters their encampment because white oil tycoons are trying to force them from their land. The Indian warriors give chase to Keaton, who ingeniously escapes their efforts to kill him. As a result, Keaton eventually becomes accepted by the tribe and given the title, "Little Chief Paleface". He subsequently leads the tribe's effort to stop the oil tycoons from displacing them from their land.
This very Kafka-esque film is Keaton's response to the Fatty Arbuckle scandal. Even though the central character's intentions are good, he cannot win, no matter how inventively he tries. He gets into various scraps with police officers throughout the film. Eventually, he unwittingly throws a bomb into a police parade and ends up being chased by a horde of cops. At the end of the film, Keaton's character locks up the cops in the police station. However, the girl he is trying to woo disapproves of his behavior and gives him the cold shoulder. Therefore, he unlocks the police station and is immediately pulled in by the cops. The film ends with the title "The End" written on a tombstone with Keaton's pork pie hat propped on it.
A large woman brings Buster to court, wrongly accusing him of smashing a window. But the judge is an immigrant who only understands Polish. He mistakes Buster and the woman for another couple and marries them to one another. The large woman brings her new husband to her home, where Buster is confronted with her brutal brothers. The next morning one of them finds a letter, which has slipped out of Buster's clothes. The man doesn't see that the letter isn't addressed to Buster, who just got it by mistake. The letter says that the addressee has inherited §100.000. Believing that Buster has become rich his new brothers-in-law start to treat him kindly. They purchase a luxury house for him by installments. When they find out that the letter actually isn't addressed to Buster, their attitude changes once more. They now want to kill him. After a furious chase Buster slips into a train just leaving for Reno.
Buster clowns around in a blacksmith's shop until he and the smithy get in a fight which sends the smithy to jail. Buster helps several customers with horses, then destroys a Rolls Royce while fixing the car parked next to it.
The film opens near a subway terminal from which Buster Keaton emerges. He finds people gambling in a house with lots of money. He tries to scare them with the cutout of a poster with a man holding gun. He puts the cutout at the window and says, "Raise your hands in air". But soon they find out when a drunk man falls over the cutout and Buster has to run. Next, he mistakenly enters a house thinking that its his own house. Inside the house, he sees a man and a woman kissing. He takes her for his wife, gets red hot angry and shoots them both, later to realize his mistake. He goes to his own house this time to find his irritating wife. Some object hits his yelling wife and she faints. A passing police officer knocks at the door after hearing her scream. Buster saves himself by playing music on gramophone and pretending to dance with his fainted wife. As soon as the officer leaves, he lets the fainted wife fall down and looks out of the window. He discovers a pretty but married neighbor (Bonnie Hill), quickly wears good clothes and takes flowers to her where she imagines he looks like Erich von Stroheim. The husband of this pretty neighbor comes back and Buster has to run. The rest of the movie is filled with funny situations of him chasing after that pretty neighbor. In the end, he wakes up in the front row of a film theater to realize that it was all a dream.
Keaton plays a botany student who is accidentally awarded an electrical engineering degree. He then attempts to wire a home using many gadgets. The man to whom the degree should have been awarded then exacts revenge by rewiring those gadgets to cause mayhem.
A young man proposes a young woman, but her father questions how he might support his daughter after the marriage. The youth informs that he will move to New York, find a job and marry the girl. If he fails, he would commit suicide. Once in the big city, he works in many professions and writes to his girlfriend; and his imaginative girl reads each letter and thinks in her beloved being successful on each trial.
A young man (Keaton) has a series of encounters in an amusement area, much like Coney Island, until happening upon a group of men preparing a hot air balloon for launch. The young man assists the group by climbing atop the balloon to afix a pennant, when the balloon mistakenly takes flight with no one aboard but the young man. The young man finally downs the balloon in a wilderness area, where he encounters a young outdoorswoman and proceeds to have a series of misadventures.
In order to escape from his life and his lost love, Keaton sets off on his small boat, Cupid, but runs into the whaling ship, The Love Nest. The whaler's merciless captain (Joe Roberts) throws crew members overboard for even the slightest offense. After his steward accidentally pours hot tea over the captain's hand, the captain tosses him overboard and replaces him with Keaton. Despite a series of mishaps, Keaton manages to avoid the fate of other crewmen.
Dumped by his girlfriend, Buster drives west and winds up in a ghost town called Vulture City, where he appoints himself sheriff.
When Buster's girlfriend falls for a trapeze artist, Buster tries to beat him at his own game.
A hillbilly family, hard-hit by the end of Prohibition, decide to set the biggest brother up as a professional wrestler.
Elmer owns a gas station out in the California desert. Soon he has a business rival in Jim, who opens up another station, and is also trying to steal Elmer's girlfriend. She plays both rivals against the other and, because she is a baseball fan, both Elmer and Jim try to show each other up in the big local baseball game.
Elmer Doolittle,a hired hand on a farm,encounters some complications in his romancing and believes he will have to marry the farm-owner aunt of Molly, the pretty girl he loves. Further complications arise when a heavy rainstorm keeps the household up all night as the water breaks through and drenches them in their beds. Comes the day of the "shotgun" wedding and Buster is surprised and delighted when he finds the old aunt is marrying him off to her niece and not to herself.
Naval recruit Elmer (Buster Keaton) is seemingly unable to discharge any of his duties without making life miserable for his irascible commanding officer (Vernon Dent), who winds up getting doused with paint, splattered with muck, and repeatedly tossed into the water due to Elmer's ineptitude. To make matters worse, Elmer takes a shine to the CO's girlfriend (Dorothea Kent), which prompts her jealous boyfriend into several wrathful chases after Elmer. He eventually has Elmer locked into the brig -- but his girlfriend is in there too, so she can be together with her beloved Elmer.
Elmer and his girlfriend run away to elope and spend their trip trying to dodge the police who are on their trail after they mistakenly make their getaway in a police car.
Keaton stars as Milton, a disappointed romantic who has sworn off women. He gives a lift to a female hitchhiker (Lona Andre), whom he happily discovers is also a hurt soul and has sworn off men. Their trip together runs into interference from an aggressive driver (Stanley J. Sandford) who later reappears after the two have set up camp. He starts putting the moves on the woman, but when Milton's ex-girlfriend (Kitty McHugh) shows up, she gets into a fight with the interloper and gives Milton and his new pal the chance to slip away.
Scoutmaster Elmer Brown (Buster Keaton) loses his heart to the pretty carhop (Lona Andre) who works in a drive-in diner. Complicating his romantic longings is her policeman fiancé (Harold Goodwin). When he tries to eliminate Elmer by giving him traffic tickets for every conceivable violation, the girl takes pity on the martyred Elmer and they drive off together. She informs him that she is also fending off another suitor, Oscar (Grant Withers); and to make matters worse, her father is backing the cop while her mother promotes Oscar. Eventually all three men wind up competing for her hand at a chaotic wedding ceremony that ends with Elmer winning his beloved.
Elmer Butts is a contestant in a radio amateur hour show hoping to win the first price... by dancing and juggling!
Buster becomes a fireman, but unfortunately not a particularly good one. He has a chance to prove himself, however, when three women are trapped in a burning building.
Elmer Triple (Buster Keaton) needs to invent something new and amazing. He succeeds not only in creating the "next big thing", but also in catching the eyes of robbers who would like to steal it.
When Buster Keaton goes to work as an assistant to a carnival magician, the results turn out to be less than magical. Enthralled with the lovely assistant (Marlyn Stuart) of The Great Spumoni (Eddie Lambert), Buster takes a job as an off-stage helper to the prestidigitator. Alas, his inept efforts turn the magician's show into a shambles: Buster levitates the illusionist instead of the girl, tosses ducks on-stage at the wrong place, and lowers down inappropriate backdrops during their performance. But when he rescues the girl from the clutches of a disgruntled former helper, Buster earns the respect of all.
Buster agrees to pose as a murderer to throw off the police while his room mate, a reporter, searches for the real killer.
Buster, an ice delivery man, falls for one of his customers, not knowing she has a twin sister living next door.
Buster, the eldest son in a family of hillbillies who manage a hotel, attempts to raise money to save the hotel from foreclosure.
A millionaire vacationing in Mexico falls for a local girl and sets out to win her.
A man relates how he outwitted the Yankee army during the Civil War.
To save money, Buster and his wife decide to drive to Detroit to buy a new car, then drive it home.
The simple-minded son of a rich financier must find his own way in the world.
The misadventures of Buster in three separate historical periods.
A man returns to his Appalachian homestead. On the trip, he falls for a young woman. The only problem is her family has vowed to kill every member of his family.
A film projectionist longs to be a detective, and puts his meagre skills to work when he is framed by a rival for stealing his girlfriend's father's pocketwatch.
Two spoiled rich people find themselves trapped on an empty passenger ship.
A man learns he will inherit a fortune if he marries by 7PM that evening.
With little luck at keeping a job in the city a New Yorker tries work in the country and eventually finds his way leading a herd of cattle to the West Coast.
A love-struck weakling must pretend to be boxer in order to gain respect from the family of the girl he loves.
After being rejected by the Confederate military, not realizing it was due to his crucial civilian role, an engineer must single-handedly recapture his beloved locomotive after it is seized by Union spies and return it through enemy lines.
To reconcile with his girlfriend, a bookish college student tries to become an athlete.
The effete son of a cantankerous riverboat captain comes to join his father's crew.
Hopelessly in love with a woman working at MGM Studios, a clumsy man attempts to become a motion picture cameraman to be close to the object of his desire.
An unimpressive but well intending man is given the chance to marry a popular actress, of whom he has been a hopeless fan. But what he doesn't realize is that he is being used to make the actress' old flame jealous.
