Miscellaneous Buster Keaton TV Roles

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.

Most significantly, Buster starred in, not one, but two TV shows in the ‘50s, The Buster Keaton Show and Life with Buster Keaton.  Both are light, amusing sitcoms chock full of physical comedy and sight gags.  Neither has much plot beyond the basic premise of Buster as a hapless sporting-goods clerk/amateur theatre director, and any scenario largely exists to give him an excuse to clown around in classic Buster fashion.  They’re not up there with his golden-era stuff, of course, but they’re pretty funny, especially considering the quick turnaround on TV at the time compared to the more thorough work he put into his silent shorts and features.  He resurrects some old gags, like the boxing training session from Battling Butler, and comes up with a lot of new stuff as well – one of my favorites is a doomed taffy-pulling session that’s a riot, pure Buster all the way.