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...