After
falling pretty significantly out of the public eye after his time with MGM,
Buster Keaton enjoyed a delightful revival in the ‘50s and ‘60s, greatly
facilitated by television. A number of
his classic silent works thought lost had been recovered, and many were shown on
TV. This helped those who’d forgotten
Buster to remember his comic genius and a new generation to discover it, and
this renewed interest led to lots of work for Buster in the relatively new
medium.
Buster’s
TV work takes several forms. The most
basic of these late career roles are simply guest spots on assorted shows. Some of it could have been played by anyone –
for instance, he features in a nice but schmaltzy Christmas episode of The Donna Reed Show as a kindly custodian
who’s been quietly arranging the children’s ward Christmas party for
years. Nothing about the role screams “Buster
Keaton,” but I’m guessing the Keaton renaissance made his character that much
more endearing to audiences. Other
stuff, while not explicitly Buster-related, feel more specifically down his
alley. He has a brief role on Burke’s Law, a crime procedural, and his
one scene involves a fun silent gimmick:
his character is being questioned by the titular Detective Burke, but he
has laryngitis, so he acts out all his answers charades-style. It’s silly but a lot of fun. And then there’s “Once Upon a Time,” an
episode of The Twilight Zone built
around Buster. The story features Buster
as a man who accidently time travels from 1890 to the 1960s – the nineteenth-century
portions are shot like a silent movie, complete with intertitles, jaunty piano
music, and sight gags. Buster does plenty
of physical comedy, including a fantastic recreation of the “missing trousers” bit
from the Arbuckle-Keaton short The Garage.
In this
era, there were a lot of “Saturday play” type shows featuring one-shot dramas
and comedies (similar to Masterpiece
today, but less British.) Buster got in
on his share of these as well. Again,
his casting was sometimes very deliberate.
In “The Silent Partner,” shown on Screen
Directors Playhouse, he plays a once-beloved, now-forgotten comic of silent
cinema. I’ve of two minds about the
program. On one hand, it clearly has a
lot of affection for Buster’s character and feels a bit like a love story to
the early pioneers of Hollywood. On the
other, the fake clips of old comedy classics are kind of terrible, more a
cynical idea of what silent movies were like instead of a true homage to
talented filmmakers like Buster. Rheingold Theatre’s “The Awakening” is
another interesting TV piece, in that it’s one of the only purely dramatic
roles Buster played in his career. Based
on a Gogol story, it tells of a man (Buster) whose eyes are opened to the
injustice of his dystopian society after the theft of his hard-earned
overcoat. It’s neat to see him in a
drama; comedy was definitely the right place for him, but he’s not bad at all.
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