A Few Notes on Buster Keaton and Animals

Animals are big in silent comedies.  I suppose it’s somewhat tied to the fact that many early film stars came from vaudeville and brought their sensibilities with them.  Animal acts were a vaudeville staple, and their popularity meant that there were a lot of highly-trained animals onstage and/or making the switch to the big screen.  Buster is no exception, and, as usual, he’s able to take something simple – the presence of an animal – and weave fantastic comedy from it.

Dogs are of course a big feature.  Buster comes by his knack for directing/acting with/writing gags for dogs honestly, since Fatty Arbuckle’s pit bull Luke was a regular cast member of the Arbuckle-Keaton shorts.  By the time Buster was making his own productions, he was well-acquainted with the talented Hollywood dog, and Luke makes a memorable appearance in The Scarecrow, one of Buster’s earliest shorts.  Mistaking Luke for a “mad dog,” Buster runs for his life with the pit bull hot on his heels, getting chased even up a ladder and precariously around the tops of the freestanding walls on a house under construction.  I love the moment when Buster finally giving up running and shakes Luke’s paw to seal their “truce.”

The dog in Our Hospitality is similarly prominent – less personality, maybe, but the gags are terrific.  It’s easy to see how slow the train really is when we see Willie’s dog easily keeping pace with it, and Willie’s expression when he gets down south and realizes his dog followed him all the way from New York is priceless.  And who doesn’t love his attempts to stay longer at the house by demonstrating all his incredibly halfhearted dog tricks time and time again?  Beyond that, there are plenty of smaller sight gags with dogs that are a ton of fun.  Buster incorporates a dog into one of his rigged-up contraptions in The High Sign, he hilariously turns his chariot into a dogsled in the Roman sequence of Three Ages, and he has a fun dog buddy in the vet scene from Daydreams; after they both get sprayed by the skunk and Buster comes out to bury his clothes, the sight of the dog trotting after him to bury its collar just kills me.

Buster also has quite a way with horses.  I adore the running gag of the horse in Hard Luck, which is way too tall for Buster to mount.  Some of his creative fixes for getting atop his horse are wonderful – my personal favorite is riding up escalator-style on his too-elastic stirrup, as well as baiting the horse with grass and then climbing up its neck while its head is bent.  There are similar too-big mule gags in Go West, the wild thing from Cops, and shoeing the fashioned-conscious horse in The Blacksmith.  Going back to Three Ages, before Buster revamps his chariot, I love that all his horses are wildly different sizes (and at least one of them is a donkey.)  And in Our Hospitality?  He disguises a horse as himself disguised as a woman.  That takes skill.

Looking at other animals, pride of place must of course go to Brown Eyes, the cow from Go West.  I never would’ve thought a cow could be such a good actress, but she’s just great with Buster.  Although, in my opinion, The Cameraman uses the monkey maybe a bit too much (it feels like a crutch at times,) it’s still fun, and you’ve gotta respect a monkey who can film news reel.  I suppose it makes sense, though – the skill of grinding an organ has to be fairly transferable to hand-cranking a camera.  My last favorite is a bit of a cheat, since I’m sure it’s a fake, but it’s so funny that I’m including it anyway.  During Alfred’s hunting trip in Battling Butler, I could die laughing at the duck that keeps diving down and popping back up on the opposite side of Alfred’s boat as he tries in vain to shoot it – so good!