Volume 27, Number 15 · October 9, 1980
Vote for Keaton
By Dwight MacDonald
Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn't Lie Down
by Tom Dardis
Scribner's, 340 pp., $12.50
Keaton: The Silent Features Close Up
by Daniel Moews
University of California Press, 337 pp., $4.50 (paper)
Buster Keaton
by David Robinson
Indiana University Press, 199 pp., $1.95 (paper)
Keaton
by Rudi Blesh
Macmillan, 395 pp., $3.95 (paper)
I think that during the Seventies Buster Keaton replaced Chaplin as the master of movie comedy most admired by Americans seriously interested in cinema. The reasons are aesthetic and historical. College (1927) is generally considered the weakest of the twelve feature-length comedies Keaton made in the Twenties, his creative period.[1] But it is superior to The Gold Rush (1925), much the best of the four long comedies Chaplin made in the Twenties. College is superior in photography, casting, plot continuity, and consistency of style, for Keaton's aim—though he would never have admitted it—was to make a work of art. But Chaplin didn't bother with such trivia: he had in mind not art but himself.
Review, 5950 words
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