I’m a fairly devoted Buster Keaton fan, but there’s certainly a whole lot that I have not yet managed to see. Still, I thought I had caught anything that would qualify as his greatest hits.
Then the other day I caught a wonderful clip that I had never seen before. Can anyone tell me what film it is from?
The stunt uses as its set piece the face of a house under construction.
Keaton is seen through the second floor window.
A woman is seen through the first floor window.
Something releases the wall/face of the structure but, unlike the famous scene of the face of a house falling on Keaton in Steamboat Bill Jr (with him safely passing through the window), in this stunt the face of the house is held in place at the center so that when the top falls the bottom swings up, the entire facade swinging 180 degrees (facing the camera). He and the woman hold on to their places in the windows and are taken along for the ride as the facade spins.
ONE WEEK is, imho, his best short. Not only does it have a smaller version of the STEAMBOAT BILL JR stunt, but also the one you just mentioned: Buster Keaton's ONE WEEK (1920) - YouTube (TC around 4:45). A treasure.
Thanks, MovieMogul!
I’ll watch the full film later tonight but, for now, I skipped ahead to the stunt in question and again it had me laughing out loud! So great!
Do you happen to know if Sybil Seely did the stunt herself?
Keaton, of course, always did his own stunts but with the way this scene is edited it looks like Seely could have gotten away with using a stunt double if she wasn’t feeling up to it.
Now that MovieMogul has addressed the OP, I have a side question.
In Seven Chances, Buster registers horror when one potential bride is African American. In College, Buster puts on blackface in order to get a waiter job in a “colored only” diner. In The Navigator, Buster and his girl are in mortal danger from a flock of Mumbo-Jumbo black cannibals.
Buster is, hands down, my favorite silent comic actor/director, and I consider him one of the top geniuses of cinema history. I also subscribe to the “Well, It Was Back Then” argument on behalf of questionable racist humor in old films.
Just wondering…how many other comics of the time indulged in this stuff? I don’t remember seeing it at all in the work of Chaplin, or Laurel & Hardy. I’ve seen very little of Harold Lloyd’s filmography aside from Safety Last and The Freshman. Not seen any Harry Langdon at all.
Was my hero Buster overly titillated by amusing Negroes?
Lloyd Hamilton did a blackface comedy called “His Darker Self”, which was meant to be his breakout picture but failed completely.
I don’t think Harold Lloyd ever appeared in blackface, but his “Haunted Spooks” does have black servants who are really scared of ghosts. The plot, btw is, as the film describes:
It was a talky, but his Feet First had the debut performance of black actor Willie Best, playing a fairly racist caricature. (Lloyd’s character nicknames him “Charcoal”, and he’s kind of slow and shuffling).
There’s also a black character in Girl Shy, but it’s not a racist portrayal. (Lloyd is in a fairly frantic car ride, trying to get to the church to stop a girl from marrying a bigamist, and he goes down a narrow road, where there’s a black motorist going the other way. The two of them are stuck, since neither can pass the other, so Lloyd suggests they trade cars and just back up.)
As far as Chaplain goes, I’m still looking, but so far the only thing I’ve found is the Chaplan/Arbuckle film, “His Favorite Pasttime”. Chaplain plays the little tramp as a belligerent drunk, who, at one point, puts out a match on the hand of the restroom attendant (in blackface) who asks for a tip, and later, goes into a woman’s house to try to seduce her, only to recoil in horror when he realizes he’s been trying to seduce the maid (who is in blackface). He then gets beaten up by the maid, the woman, her husband, and the people upstairs, and that’s a wrap, people.