Buster Keaton in The Navigator (1924, dir. Buster Keaton & Donald Crisp) (via goldensilents.com)

Very early in [Buster Keaton’s] movie career, friends asked him why he never smiled on the screen. He didn’t realize he didn’t. He had got the dead-pan habit in variety; on the screen he had merely been so hard at work it had never occurred to him there was anything to smile about. Now he tried it just once and never again. He was by his whole style and nature so much the most deeply “silent” of the silent comedians that even a smile was as deafeningly out of key as a yell. In a way his pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler’s effortless, uninterested face.

Keaton’s face ranked almost with Lincoln’s as an early American archetype; it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful, yet it was irreducibly funny; he improved matters by topping it off with a deadly horizontal hat, as flat and thin as a phonograph record. One can never forget Keaton wearing it, standing erect at the prow as his little boat is being launched. The boat goes grandly down the skids and, just as grandly, straight on to the bottom. Keaton never budges. The last you see of him, the water lifts the hat off the stoic head and it floats away.

-James Agee, The Great Stone Face, LIFE magazine (1949)

Buster Keaton & Florence Turner in College (1927, dir. James W. Horne)

“I’ve simply been brought up being knocked down. My pop’s idea of comedy was to kick me clean across the stage or throw me through every backdrop on the Keith circuit, and I’ll bet I’ve taken more punishment in the way of being used as a human mop than Bat Nelson, Ad Wolgast, and Jim Jeffries combined. The funny part is that I liked it. By the time I got up to around seven or eight years old, we were called ‘The Roughest Act That Was Ever in the History of the Stage.’

It was Sarah Bernhardt who said, ‘How can you do this to this poor boy?’ when they were throwing me around madly. Everybody said that. We used to get arrested every other week—that is, the old man would get arrested. Once they took me to the mayor of New York City, into his private office, with the city physicians & they stripped me to examine me for broken bones and bruises. Finding none, the mayor gave me permission to work. The next time it happened, the following year, they sent me to Albany, to the governor of the state. I got so used to it that I took my clothes off every time I saw an officer.”

-Buster Keaton, 1921

Caption on the back of the photo (circa 1923):

The question is: can they make Buster Keaton laugh? Not if he is awake. Buster has never been known to laugh although he has made millions roar. Here are three of Buster Keaton’s scenario staff and his director Eddie Cline trying to “laugh” Keaton into a story.

Keaton once said, “I developed the ‘Stone Face’ thing quite naturally. Even as a small kid, I happened to be the type of comic that couldn’t laugh at his own material. I soon learned at an awful early age that when I laughed the audience didn’t. So, by the time I got into pictures, that was a natural way of working.”

Buster Keaton & Kathryn McGuire in Sherlock, Jr. (1924, dir. Buster Keaton) (click to enlarge)

In Sherlock Jr., Keaton’s character, a film projectionist, looks to the movie he’s showing for guidance on how to woo the woman he loves. Imitating the actors works like a charm until the film suddenly jumps forward in time. The lovers in the movie are now the proud parents of twin babies, leaving our hero quite perplexed about how to replicate that.

Scene here, full film can be seen here /here.

Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928, dir. Charles Reisner)

Keaton’s most famous gag occurred in Steamboat Bill, Jr., in which the facade of a house falls on top of him & he survives because he is standing exactly where the open attic window falls. Keaton declined to rehearse the stunt before shooting the scene because, as he explained, he trusted his set-up, so why waste a wall?

Excerpted from Marion Meade’s Buster Keaton:

“As he stood in the studio street waiting for a building to crash on him, he noticed that some of the electricians and extras were praying. The window was just big enough to give two inches of clearance on either side. Keaton drove a nail in the ground to mark his position. When the moment came and the house front came down, he froze. The open window hit him exactly as planned. Afterward, he would call the stunt one of his greatest thrills. He said later that he did not care whether he lived or died: ‘I was mad at the time, or I never would have done the thing.’”

Scene on youtube here, entire movie online at Internet Archive here.

Buster Keaton & Josephine on the set of The Cameraman (1928, dir. Edward Sedgwick & Buster Keaton) (via)

Buster Keaton and Kathryn McGuire in publicity still for The Navigator (1924, dir. Donald Crisp & Buster Keaton) Full film online here. 

Buster Keaton in production still for Sidewalks of New York (1931, dir. Jules White)

“It was on purpose that I started looking miserable, humiliated, hounded, and haunted, bedeviled, bewildered, and at my wit’s end. Some other comedians can get away with laughing at their own gags. Not me. The public just will not stand for it. And that is all right with me. All of my life I have been happiest when the folks watching me said to each other, ‘Look at the poor dope, wilya?’

Because of the way I looked on the stage and screen the public naturally assumed that I felt hopeless and unloved in my personal life. Nothing could be farther from the fact. As long back as I can remember I have considered myself a fabulously lucky man. From the beginning I was surrounded by interesting people who loved fun and knew how to create it. I’ve had few dull moments and not too many sad and defeated ones.”

-Buster Keaton, in his autobiography My Wonderful World of Slapstick (1960)

(via)

Buster Keaton in Sherlock, Jr. (1924, dir. Buster Keaton) (via)

Buster Keaton on the MGM sound stage used for Speak Easily (1932) (via)

Buster Keaton in Go West (1925, dir. Buster Keaton) (via)