Michael Phillips: ‘A projectile, hurled into the future.’ Why silent film star Buster Keaton is the subject of 2 new books and speaks directly to our own nervous times

At some point in my childhood, there it was: My first Buster Keaton.

Was he on WGN? PBS? One of the two, probably. In the days before streaming, Blockbuster Video and VCRs, growing up in Racine, Wisconsin, meant being able to get the Chicago TV stations as well as the Milwaukee ones for free.

The film, 18 minutes of eloquent comic velocity, was “Cops,” which turns 100 years old in March. At one point the unwitting, unnamed character played by Keaton tosses an anarchist’s bomb in the direction of a horde of Los Angeles police officers, sparking a chase and the bit I loved most, performed by my new favorite screen star.

A ladder, precarious, leans up against a fence. The cops, having left a massive policemen’s parade behind, race after Keaton, who scurries up out of reach, scooches and somersaults this way and that, riding the ladder like a teeter-totter. It’s a few seconds of screen time, accomplished in long takes and in unassailably truthful medium shot. No blunt close-ups for comic emphasis. None needed.

This mysterious, unsmiling, unforgettable man with the soul of a stoic and the finesse of an acrobatic poet worked in “Cops” without a stunt double, as he did in nearly every instance of his on-camera life. Joseph Francis “Buster” Keaton, born in 1895 in Piqua, Kansas, had been trained since infancy, or nearly, to take pratfalls and get thrown around and sometimes all the way off the stage. He risked his neck for laughs as part of the famously brutal specialty routine offered by the family business: The Three Keatons, for years a well-known touring act in American vaudeville.

“The human mop,” father Joseph Keaton billed him. In the act, Joe played the stereotypical Irishman, determined to discipline his naughty son. “The Boy Who Can’t Be Damaged.” That was another way Joe sold his boy to the public.

Joe sewed a suitcase handle into his son’s costume, so he could throw him further, higher, faster and a little more reliably. This helped keep Buster away from serious danger when his father performed drunk. Mother Myra stayed off to the side on stage, performing on saxophone.

“Equipped with many implements of violence,” wrote Chicago Daily Tribune entertainment reporter Percy Hammond, April 29, 1914, “they assault and batter each other gravely for half an hour, indulging meantime in all the acrobatic ‘falls’ known to variety … there is more comedy in one of ‘Buster’ Keaton’s quaint stares than there is in a hundred sketches of the kind that infest the vaudeville theaters every week.”

Three years later Keaton, at 22, made his first film appearance. By 1920, in full control of all aspects of business behind and in front of the camera, he made “One Week,” a two-reeler (roughly 20 minutes) about a married couple assembling a do-it-yourself starter home from a kit and a mixed-up set of instructions. It was astonishingly clever then and it’s the same today. Only the century has changed.

A couple of months after “Cops,” sometime in the early ‘70s, I caught another Keaton film made in what I didn’t realize was his later, largely humiliating early sound-era career.

The film, a moneymaker in 1933 but now widely considered a crushing low point in a great star’s career, came just a few, fast, upward-then-downward-sloping years after “Cops,” after “Our Hospitality” (with its stunning climax, Buster swinging on a rope across a raging river to save the heroine from certain death over a waterfall) and “The Navigator” and “Sherlock Jr.” and “The General” and so many others.

“What! No Beer?” co-starred but, in actuality, showcased Jimmy Durante. Keaton was cripplingly drunk during much of the filming. The gags either were awful or AWOL. What happened? Why was “Cops” so great and “What! No Beer?” so not? Same guy, after all. I had the same perplexed viewing experience around that time with my first two Marx Brothers movies, also on TV, also probably on WGN Channel. A great one (”Horse Feathers”) followed by later, depressing one (”The Big Store”). This is how some kids grow up to be critics, just like their parents always dreamed would happen.

Two radically different new books, “Camera Man” by Slate critic Dana Stevens and “Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life” by author James Curtis, explore Keaton’s life and life’s work. The Curtis biography, the first in two decades, is exhaustive in its detail, dutifully complete in straightforward, 832-page fashion. On the whole I’d start with “Camera Man,” which is roughly half the length and twice as stimulating.

“It’s not a biography. It’s a cultural history of Buster Keaton’s lifespan,” Stevens says, noting that Keaton’s life coincided roughly with the birth of cinema itself.

“Camera Man” started, she says, with “an outline on a napkin with five Roman numerals on it. I had the idea of dividing the book into sections: Thrown, Flying, Falling, Landing, plus a prologue titled ‘1895,” the year of Buster’s birth. This image of Buster as a projectile, thrown through history, stuck with me. And so it became Thrown, his childhood; Flying, his years of success in silent film; Falling, when everything fell apart at MGM, his alcoholism and everything else; and Landing, finding his way back, finding (his third wife) Eleanor, and his starting to work in television.”

Stevens adds that Keaton’s wasn’t a simple, tragic rise and fall: “There were all the things that made the last third of Buster’s life much happier than most people think of it being.”

Nothing Stevens had read previously on Keaton, she says, “placed him a broad enough historical context to help me understand the importance of his work, or how illustrative his life was of so many things outside that life.”

In “Camera Man” the digressions are marvels, because they’re tributaries, not digressions, feeding many aspects of American life as Keaton lived it. The child labor laws of which the Keaton family continually ran afoul; the very notion of institutionalized if widely varying child welfare practices; the state of the film industry in the first two decades of the 20th century; the rise of Alcoholics Anonymous around the time Keaton was suffering through his harshest “cures” just before AA came on the scene: It’s all there, providing that wider context.

Keaton never goes away for long these days. There are 4K digital restorations of many of his films, distributed by Cohen Media Group. The late director Peter Bogdanovich’s final film, “The Great Buster,” is a handy starting point for the Keaton newcomer; in Bogdanovich’s 1972 smash “What’s Up, Doc?” (another key film in my comedy-nerd childhood), he pays tribute not only to ‘30s screwball but the chase and “thrill” comedy Keaton mapped out with fastidious glee in his best silent years in the ‘20s.

“Sherlock Jr.” ends with one of the greatest chases in cinema history. At Facets Film Camp every summer, a new group of kids discovers that film, and Keaton’s pioneering place in early cinema.

“I love showing it, because I love surprising them and listening to them laughing out loud,” says Facets Youth Programs Director Kathleen Beckman. (Disclosure: Two kids in my household first saw “Sherlock Jr.” there, and loved it.) “The film’s practically a hundred years old, and it’s such a validation, to hear how it plays today. Every year, it’s the favorite. Kids remember this film, and that laughter tells me we’re doing something right.”

In both new Keaton books, the evocations of Keaton’s uniquely bruising childhood in vaudeville threaten to overshadow a reader’s understanding of how Keaton became Keaton, learning what he learned in a traveling school of literal hard knocks. In later years Keaton, who supported much of his extended family for decades, never maligned his father. He did, however, note that when touring as a child and then teenager with The Three Keatons, “the bruises never had a chance to heal” when the two-a-day schedule gave way to the more arduous three-a-day bookings.

Keaton’s own autobiography includes passages where he revisits a childhood spent as “a human rubber ball” — and as a budding deadpan genius.

As Keaton wrote: “If something tickled me and I started to grin, the old man would hiss, ‘Face! Face!’ That meant freeze the puss. The longer I held it, why, if we got a laugh, the blank pan or the puzzled puss would double it.”

Contrary to legend, he smiled occasionally on camera, before and after his peak years of deadpan stardom. The Great Stone Face, the media called him. But was it? Not really. It’s too memorable a face for that moniker. Keaton’s minimalist canvas of emotional expression spoke volumes in the key of creeping alarm, upper-crust hauteur, dawning realization of imminent or present disaster.

As critic and essayist Kenneth Tynan wrote, and as quoted in James Curtis’s biography: “If Chaplin was the greatest lyrical comic, this was the greatest stoic; and we live, of necessity, in a stoical age.” That was six decades ago. And that explains why Keaton still speaks to where we’re going, along with where we’ve been.

In Stevens’ book, she writes: “The more you immerse yourself in the 1920s, a period of enormous creative dynamism but also of teeth-rattling instability, the more a single insight seems to animate nearly all the art and popular culture of the age: that the world is a dangerous and unpredictable place, and in it each of us is alone.”

The glory of Buster Keaton is how he turned all that, and his frequently airborne childhood, into comic poetry.

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“Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century” by Dana Stevens (Atria Books) publishes Jan. 25; “Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life” by James Curtis (Knopf) publishes Feb. 15.

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