Since this is the last year that venerable Yankee Stadium will be used by the most well-known baseball team in America, I wanted to post this little gem from the end of the Sillent Film era. It's 1928 and Buster Keaton (1895-1966) plays a small-time photographer trying to break into the newsreel business in New York City. He goes to film a ball game, but finds out that the Yanks aren't in town. Undaunted, and left alone in the park, Buster decides to pantomime a baseball game where he is both star pitcher and home-run hitter.
The film is "The Cameraman" and it was shot on location in Manhattan and here in the Bronx, where Yankee Stadium was built and opened in 1923. This is the way the park looked when Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig played there. It was the first film he made for MGM pictures and,after losing all creative control over his work, his association with that studio would end his carrer as a film star by 1933 and land him a broke and alcoholic has-been in Hollywood.
But Buster would eventually sober up and revive his career in television and in guest parts in many films. Keaton did more than survive his self-inflicted and visited-upon setbacks...he endured as the 20th Century's Great American Silent Comedian.
I think it's a shame that much silent comedy is dismissed as being inferior to spoken word stuff. Clearly the timing and characterisation in this piece is excellent
ReplyDeleteGreat clip Doug, over and above Buster Keaton's performance, it was good to get those panorama shots of 1920s still 'human scale' Manhattan and the train was a treat too. When I see archive film like this I wonder what people in the buildings around are doing and thinking and whether they could believe what has happened there and in the world since....even in their wildest nightmares?
ReplyDeleteI really like these historic bit's of film that despite it being less than a century ago inspires similar feelings in me an Pompeii does....lost horizons indeed.
I always thought Buster Keaton was so much more funnier than Charlie Chaplin.
ReplyDeleteKeaton was a lifelong baseball fan, who had his own studio team in Hollywood. He also frequently played in charity games, especially during WWII. You're right, Ian, he doesn't miss a beat here.
ReplyDeleteMy thoughts as well, and many other film fans I know from discussions. "Human scale" is a good description. As much as the struggle of life was tough as well in those days, you wanmt to go there somehow or at least tell the people of 1928 New York that they are living between two great wars and a Depression. Take in the city and its confines and the open areas of your world, I'd say ...this livability will not last for your children and certainly not your grandchildren.
ReplyDeleteI think Keaton frequently was the more inventive guy. I don't want to open a big Chaplin/Keaton feud, since both men respected each other's talents and were at least friendly to one another without being close friends...Chaplin was a great comedian but I think its safe to say Keaton adapted the camera to his comedy whereas Chaplin was content to film funny material he could've replicated in the Music Halls he sprang from.
ReplyDeleteAn interesting insight Doug, I hadn't thought of that but upon reflection I think you are absolutely right. I think Harold Lloyd was another camera-centric performer too..... now you come to mention it.
ReplyDeleteah yes, Harold Lloyd was fantastic as well!
ReplyDeleteI agree totally with both roolee and AA. Lloyd often went to great lengths in his silent features to capture things you could only have done successfully on film. The best-known is, of course, his apparent climb up a multi-floor skyscaper in downtown LA in "Safety Last" (1923). ( I was lucky enough to see the film on a big screen back when silent films were rescreened at a big theater in San Francisco in the late Seventies/early Eighties ) Believe me, the television perspective does not do the last minutes of "Safety Last" justice.
ReplyDeleteOf course, Lloyd could be funny without "thrill comedy", as all three men could. But he was "camera-centric".
One of my favorite Lloyd sequences is his race to save his lady love for marrying a bigimist in "Girl Shy" (1924), part of which I will put on my next video posting.