A Few Thoughts on Three Ages

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.

Top Five Gags: Three Ages

Three Ages in many ways straddles the line between a short and a feature.  After all, an hour-long film that tells the same story three times in different settings is essentially three two-reel shorts, divided into segments.  The gags also feel more reminiscent of a short, silly bits that Buster would call “cartoon gags.”  The features that came afterword are definitely funnier and better made, but there’s still good comedy to be found here.

Stone Age Calling Card

I get a huge kick out of the Stone-Age and Roman-Age anachronisms, and this one might be my favorite of all:  Buster presenting his “card” before entering someone else’s cave.  The fact that it’s a stone tablet is funny enough, but I love that it’s just a very simple carving of his face.

Collapsing Automobile

No idea how he did this one.  Normally, with the really impressive bits, it’s easy to find the play-by-play for how Buster made it happen, but I’ve never found an explanation for how he got that car to fall to pieces.  The sight gag is absurd, and the timing is just impeccable (and I wouldn’t have thought collapsing cars were known for their comic timing!)

Chariot Race

There are some fun chariot sight gags earlier in the film (I love that each of his four horses/donkeys are such mismatched sizes, and the spare wheel on the back cracks me up,) but this whole sequence is terrific.  The old Buster ingenuity is in full force here, swapping out his wheels for skis and his horses for dogs when the big race comes on the heels of a blizzard.  I also love that he has a “spare” here as well, an extra dog to trade places when one gets tired.

Police Chase

The mere fact of this fantastic circular gag that takes Buster from the police station, across the city, and back again is awesome enough; the transitions of falling in through the open window, sliding down the firemen’s pole, dropping onto the fire truck, and riding straight back to the burning police station are pitch-perfect.  But, of course, it’s made even better by the rooftop-jump that Buster doesn’t make, the one he was supposed to clear and was laid up for a few days over.  He decided the footage of him missing the ledge was funnier than it would’ve been to make it and shot a few extra gags to show how he broke his fall.  Now that’s the mother of invention!

In the Lions’ Den

Very cartoony, but I like it anyway.  I enjoy the set-up of Buster not being able to remember of specifics of Aesop’s fable, just that someone made friends with a lion by doing something with its paw, and the sight of Buster giving a giant lion puppet a mani is terrific.  It reminds me a little of him offering the choosy horse from The Blacksmith a wide range of horseshoe styles.

Three Ages (1923)

 

This early Buster Keaton feature is remarkably fun.  The story’s fairly thin by design, but it gives you a great idea of Buster’s inventive comic sensibility and the fantastic films he’d make in the years to come.  This was actually the first feature film that he created; although he starred in The Saphead a few years earlier, he was in it strictly as an actor.  Here, he’s the lead actor, the director, and an uncredited writer, presumably cooking up the terrific gags and creative comedic bits.

 

The central conceit of the film is that love is the same through all of time, and to demonstrate this idea, the same love story is told in stages in three different eras:  the Stone Age, the Roman Age, and the Modern Age (in this case, of course, 1923.)  In all three sections, Buster plays slightly different variations of his intrepid “little fellow” character, and the same actors play the girl he loves, her parents, and his rival across the assorted periods.  This, by the way, is why the plot isn’t terribly substantial – it’s the same story multiplied by three, given time-appropriate twists, and separated into chunks.

 

It’s amusing to see how the different aspects of the love story are transposed for the different times.  A fight with clubs in the Stone Age becomes a chariot race in the Roman Age becomes a baseball game in the Modern Age, and so on.  There are all sorts of little comedic touches that reward your attention.  My personal favorite is Roman Age Buster’s chariot – it’s rather haphazardly pulled by four steeds of varying breeds and sizes, at least one of which is a donkey.  (Poor Buster always has an uphill battle.  His Stone Age ride, a brontosaurus, is a boat compared to his rival’s sleeker, trendier mammoth.)

 

Like in Our Hospitality, Buster provides plenty of gags at the expense of his period setting.  While there’s a little fun poked at their old-timey ways, however, the main attraction this time around is an amusing collection of anachronisms.  Stone Age’s Buster’s “card” when he goes a-callin’ is a small stone tablet with a stick figure rendition of him carved into it, and Roman Age Buster has a spare wheel on the back of his chariot.

 

One thing I always love about Buster’s work is his character’s clever and unexpected solutions to his problems, and that’s definitely evident here.  I think Roman Age Buster seems to be the most on top of things – he comes up with quite the fix for his jalopy of a chariot, and Aesop would’ve been surprised at his method of making friends with lions – but all three have their moments.

 

All in all, though it’s not on par with his best stuff, it makes for a good time, and there’s a lot to love.  Plus, the sight of Buster in a caveman costume and wig is enough to make me giggle.

 

Warnings

 

Slapstick violence, some drinking, a rather mean gag at the expense of a poor cat, and a little outdated racial humor.