Romance in comedy. Excellent vid!

Excellent montage for this tribute video on the romantic side of Keaton's movies :)

58 years old and back flipping

"I had four friends who retired at the age of sixty-five and they were all dead within a year. They simply had nothing to do, nothing to occupy their minds. I have so many projects coming up that I don't have time to think about kicking the bucket. People always tell me that I'm immortal. I just might prove them right. Hell, the way I feel, I just might live forever."
Buster Keaton, 1965

The best tribute videos

Here's another of my favorite tribute videos. Nice choice of clips and music!

The most beautiful smile!

This is the final part of Le Roi des Champs-Elysées. The movie is in French. Keaton is dubbed in all but one sentence, when he says "Ouvre la porte" with a very funny American accent at 9:32

If you do not speak French, nor Spanish, probably you will not want to watch all the movie, but if you just watch the last minute (the final sequence I refer to starts at 15:50), you will see the most beautiful smile of Keaton! Well, I don't know if it's the most beautiful, but it is really really beautiful :)

I did not expect it and it was a wonderful surprise. You will be amazed! Buster Keaton was said to smile and laugh a lot off screen, but we rarely see him smiling on screen, so this is one of the rare instances , and what a beautiful smile it is :)

His role as the villain is also interesting! If you can bear the foreign languages (I did, I must say it was alright), you can find the whole movie on youtube, on littlelovenest channel. Just to make it easy for you:

part 1
part 2
part 3
part 4

Littlelovenest has also a great blog, with pictures and gifs of Buster Keaton. Definitely recommended!

Tilt

The Haunted House (1921)
Source: deforest

Just so beautiful

Buster Keaton and Viola Dana (?)
I found it in this great blog
Originally from silentstanzas

A stunning piece of detective work!

Browsing the web for pictures of Buster Keaton dressed like a clown for the movie Free and Easy, I found this one on MOTHLIGHT (by the way, Mothlight is a magazine that collects "Reviews, Previews, Top Tens and Home-Made Images. A Big Ol' Box of Cinematic All Sorts"... it may be worth having a look!)



The caption says: Buster Keaton as ‘Pippo the Clown’ (The Greatest Show on Earth, 1964). I had never heard of Pippo the clown, nor of The Greatest show on earth, so I was really curious and decided to investigate! Instead of finding out more about the character and the show, for some reason I stubbornly decided to trace the picture back to its original source first.

I googled further and found a clue in another blog called Could be madness-this?

There the authors says the he found the same picture through his favorite collector on Flikr. I then headed to Fiklr! I felt a little bit like this:

Sherlock Jr. (1924)

However Flikr was as far as I could go! John Bosko, the Flikr collector, mentions in the comments on this page that he found the picture in a collection of Hollywood stars but was not 100% sure it was Buster. Other users helped him identify the clown as Keaton! In particular, one user found out that Keaton played Pippo in an episode of the series The Greatest Show on Earth in 1964, so that the picture was probably taken on that set! The episode is You're alright, Ivy and it is the last episode of the series, that was interrupted after one season. You can check some details about the show on imdb, but wikipedia actually says more about it. It was an American drama series about the American circus. I found more information about the final episode in The Classic TV Archive:

YOU'RE ALL RIGHT, IVY [UCLA]
(c) 1964 Desilu Productions, Inc. and Cody Productions, Inc.
28Apr64 ABC Tue (Network rerun 18Aug64)
executive producer, Stanley Colbert
producer, Robert Rafelson
writer, William Wood.
directed by Jack Palance
Editor, Ben H. Ray;
photography, Charles Straumer
music, Jeff Alexander.
Starring: Jack Palance (Johnny Slate); Stu Erwin (Otto King)

Guest Cast:
Lynn Loring ............. Ivy Hatch
Ted Bessell ............. Loring Wagner

Buster Keaton ........... Pippo
Joe E. Brown ............ Diamond Dimey Vine
Joan Blondell ........... T.T. Hill
Betsy Jones-Moreland .... Louella Grant
Barbara Pepper .......... fat woman
Larry Montaigne ......... Felix
Joe Weston
Joe Zboran.

"Joan Blondell, Buster Keaton and Joe E. Brown portray a trio of veteran performers, now reduced to handling menial chores around the circus. Slate's (the circus' manager) most pressing problem, however, is an uninterested young man who's been turned over to him to 'learn the business.' Over this barrier of gloom climbs spirited and ambitious Ivy Hatch, who has run away from home to join the circus. Ivy has one drawback: She doesn't have any special talent"

I searched and searched and searched but could not find any videos :(

Well, it all started from another clown role, so to close the story, here's a video from Free and Easy, where Buster's character, Elmer, plays a clownish king in a Hollywood movie. Even if Free and Easy is a bad movie, and even if Buster is made a sad clown at the end, this part still makes me laugh...

Buster Keaton talks about his family (1958)

Family portrait (Love Nest on Wheels, 1937).
From top right, clockwise: Buster Keaton, his mother Myra,
younger sister Louise, and younger brother Harry.
You can find this movie on youtube:part 1
part 2

Interview with Buster Keaton, Robert Franklin and Joan Franklin, 1958. From the book: Buster Keaton Interviews, Kevin W. Sweeney ed. (I recommend this book!)

"My mother's father, named Cutler, had a medicine show, and my mother was part of it. [...] My mother was playing in this show - could play piano, bass fiddle, and a cornet - from the time she was twelve years old. So when she grew up she played old maid parts in shows. She was liable to play anything, from [From] Rags to Riches to Way Down East.
My father came from an Indiana family on the outskirts of Terre Haute, called Dogwalk. He first heard about the gold rush in California, so he rode freight cars and bummed his way out to get into that. Not much luck. He got back home. About that time, Oklahoma opened up the Cherokee Strip, so he went into that, and got himself 160 acres near Perry, Oklahoma. The man going alongside him - they became great friends at the time - was Will Rogers. Couple of years later, they opened up Oklahoma proper, and he went back into that one - another land rush. This time he headed for Perry itself and got two city lots. On the first one, on the Cherokee Strip, he left home with $8, and on the border, before he entered the Cherokee Strip, he bought $1 worth of bacon and beans and $7 worth of ammunition, because you had to stay up day and night to protect our claim stake. If they'd catch you sleeping, they'd just knock you in the head, take your name off it, and put their own up. [...]
He established this second one from the Oklahoma rush, waiting in line to clear his claim, when this medicine show of Cutler's came through. He goes in and sees the show and falls for the soubrette, who is now seventeen. Soon as he gets his claim filed, he joins the show as a stagehand and works his way into playing bits in the show, and it was just a natural thing for him. He was a natural dancer, a great pair of legs to do eccentric work and high kicking, and a natural clown. He was with the show about six months; he and my mother were married. I was born on a one-night stand at Piqua. They left my mother there for two weeks, and then she rejoined the show with me, and I've never seen the town since."

Buster's father appeared in several films too. In The Neighbours (1921), Buster's father plays... Buster's father! He makes his entrance at 1:25.

Here's part 1

And here's part 2

Sunday wisdom

From The Cameraman (1928)

The Scarecrow: a picture and a one-room house!

This seems like a promo picture for The Scarecrow (1920).

(From doctormacro.com)

This is a very sweet movie! I adore the one-room scene! Surreal and imaginative. And here it is!

If you want to see the whole movie: part 1, part 2.

The best tribute videos

Two of my favorite tribute videos.

The first one is from AndQuiteFrankly. He (or she?) has also uploaded several shorts and movies of Buster Keaton on youtube, including come Columbia shorts. Their quality is higher than most of other videos available, so I recommend to have a look at his channel if you want to see some Buster! You can see excerpts from the Columbia shorts in this tribute video, and that's part of the reason I like it. I think these little movie parts get a fresh look here! And I love the music too! Simply well done.

The second video is very sweet. The description says it all:
"So much has been said about Buster's deadpan. But really his face was amazingly expressive. He could say so much in just the blink of his eyes."
This is a quiet video. Not a lot of action, but a lot of those eyes!

Favorite pics and stills

(From doctormacro.com)

This pic is from Convict 13.

Favorite pics and stills

My obsession already bored all my friends, so I need to vent it somewhere else!
I'll put favorite Buster Keaton stuff here to share it with everyone :)