This is what drives Keaton's movies - the mechanics of the gag. He was a diligent student of what made people laugh, and he took a mechanic's delight in the construction of gags. When he titled his autobiography "My Wonderful World of Slapstick," it was meant both ironically - it was often far from wonderful - and literally. Keaton's films are like elaborate laboratories set up for research into the physics of slapstick. But what is immediately striking about these movies is their expert sense of design and execution. Griffith's 1916 epic "Intolerance," stands out for its attention to period detail and "Go West" is remembered for its ravishing Western landscapes. "The General" (1927) - Keaton's own favorite and usually touted as his masterpiece - is justly praised for its expansive depiction of the antebellum South "Three Ages," Keaton's droll parody of D.W. Instead, there is a kind of mathematical purity to his films. Keaton never pursued the sentimental or the poetic he never got icky. Outraged, the man pulls a gun on Keaton and growls, "When you say that, smile." Try though he might, however, the Great Stone Face can't work up a grin - even at gunpoint - forcing him to parody the tragic Lillian Gish in "Broken Blossoms" by using his fingers to push up the corners of his mouth. In "Go West" (1925), Keaton accuses one of his opponents in a poker game of dealing off the bottom of the deck. At times, his intractability could get him - or, rather, his characters - into trouble. Whether he is sitting placidly on the cowcatcher of a train hurtling full-speed toward the camera, as he is in "The Goat" (1921), or pacing up and down the spine of a dinosaur, as he did in "Three Ages" (1923), Keaton maintains the same mask of neutrality. What he wants is laughs, pure and simple. In fact, it is very seldom that he asks anything of us emotionally. Unlike Charlie Chaplin, his contemporary and rival, Keaton never asks for our sympathy or approval. Amid the tumult, Keaton stands alone, silent and imperturbable, the calm, impassive eye of the 20th-century hurricane. Not so Buster Keaton, whose centennial this month has been commemorated by a spectacular 30-film boxed set by Kino Video. As a rule, we prefer our heroes to be accessible, gregarious, larger than life. Keaton is a unique figure not just in the history of film, but in the whole, long American parade. Yet somehow, no other figure in film seems as motionless, as enduringly still. Perhaps better than any others, his movies capture the tumultuous, headlong spirit of his time. Like Mack Sennett before him, Keaton understood that film is action, and he shared with most Americans a love of speed. Of all the silent comics, he was the most silent. At the same time, its beauty is as distant and inscrutable as the lunar surface it suggests isolation, loneliness, perhaps even despair. White as alabaster, with dark, shy, feline eyes and high, finely sculpted cheekbones, it was capable of a vast range of expression, from the open inquisitiveness of a child to the worldly nonchalance of a millionaire playboy. Next to Garbo, Buster Keaton possessed the most exquisite face in the history of the movies.
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