September 24, 1923—the day Three Ages was released. I was prepared to do my usual Top Five Gags post following my rewatch, but I realized I already wrote one back in 2016! (I see that I managed that for several of Buster’s independent features before circling back to the Fatty Arbuckle shorts when the 100-year anniversaries started rolling in.) At any rate, I needed something else to talk about today for Three Ages. Since the story isn’t really substantial enough for a Favorite Characters or Relationship Spotlight post, I figured I’d just put a few general thoughts together.
Overall, Buster’s independent features are more ambitious than his shorts. This makes sense—he has more screentime to fill, needs bigger spectacles for a main attraction at the theater, and presumably, he has more money to work with. His shorts reflect all kinds of creativity and innovation, and his mechanical gags have always been wonderfully impressive, but many of them, quite understandably, place Buster in a particular situation and let havoc ensue. With his features, he starts branching out more: period pieces, setting stories almost entirely aboard yachts or trains, the (dreamed) movie-within-a-movie of Sherlock Jr.
Three Ages, his first true independent feature, is a pretty bold departure from his shorts. “Period” doesn’t begin to cover it—a third of the film is set in the Stone Age, with another third in the Roman Age. Buster flexes entirely new muscles here as a creator, and I imagine that some audience members at the time didn’t quite know what to make of it. I mean, by this point, Buster was strongly associated with his signature porkpie hat. Going without it for much of his first feature is a big change in and of itself.
Then again, Buster was never one to do things by halves, so maybe he makes sense that he plunges audiences right into the deep end of realizing just how much he’s going to stretch his vision as a filmmaker. And even though Three Ages feels quite out-there on a surface level, much of its humor feels right in line with Buster’s sensibilities.
It’s perhaps easier to spot “classic Buster” in the Modern Age scenes, which give us his more familiar trappings, but this is undeniably a Buster Keaton film through and through. We get terrific mechanical gags, such as Roman Age Buster turning his chariot into a dogsled or Modern Age Buster’s incredible collapsing car. We get a fantastic chase sequence anchored by a brilliant circular gag, and we get Buster’s wonderful little flourishes, like Stone Age Buster solemnly blowing a kiss as he’s knocked off a ledge into the water below.
More than anything, though, what really feels like Buster to me is the film’s modernity. Buster always enjoyed being on the cutting edge, obsessed with how things work and forever pushing the boundaries of filmmaking. His humor, even in his period pieces, has a modern-for-its-time slant to it, and that includes the Stone Age and Roman Age sequences in this film. I love all the goofy anachronisms, like Stone Age Buster’s “calling card” or Roman Age Buster having a spare wheel on the back of his chariot. And I like the little hints that, while love may be the same across the eras, some things have changed by the Modern Age. Instead of trying to win Margaret Leahy’s father’s favor to have a chance of getting with her, Buster now has to impress her mother, and I love that final scene shows Buster and Margaret raising a dog together, rather than the gaggle of children seen in both the Stone Age and the Roman Age.
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