Silent : What is the best Buster Keaton movie

What is the best Buster Keaton movie

Did a podcast for the movie The General and i found a couple places that reported the movie to be Keaton's choice as his best work. Curious about what people think Buster Keaton's best movie is and why.

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Re: What is the best Buster Keaton movie

Forget about his sound features. His best movie in my opinion, is "The General" a true Classic.

Re: What is the best Buster Keaton movie

The General deserves its claim to "masterpiece", but my #1 Keaton film is The Cameraman which beautifully works as satire, as romance, and it is overloaded with laughs and thrills.





"Scram, Sherlock. I'm working this side of the street."

Re: What is the best Buster Keaton movie

I have put this on a couple of forums and I have seen Our Hospitality (1923), Sherlock, Jr. (1924), The General (1926), Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), and The Cameraman (1928). Nothing from his later years. Did anything good come out of his work in later years besides cameos?

Truly knowing our history is truly knowing ourselves

Re: What is the best Buster Keaton movie

Oh, I liked 'A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.' I enjoyed seeing Buster in the company of not only the old pros like Zero Mostel and Phil Silvers, but the new talent also, like Michael Crawford. I love the song 'Comedy Tonight.'

Re: What is the best Buster Keaton movie

I don't know if it is his best but my favorite is College.

"50, count 'em 50, ambassadors will definitely appear at the peace conference."

Re: Buster Keaton: CANDID CAMERA

Some folks here must remember a pretty good tv show from half a century back. The one I still recall is in a diner with a young gal and guy at the counter.
Buster is sitting to the right of the guy and fumbling with spoons, cups and food.
The gal can see him, and is quietly trying to get the guy to turn around, when he does, Buster has everything under control. When the guy turns to the girl, Buster starts up again, and the girl now is almost falling off *her seat trying not to burst out laughing.
Apparently neither of them recognize the man in the porkpie hat is a once famous comedian.

Re: What is the best Buster Keaton movie

I love the completely original, totally unexpected, wickedly unsentimental, and wonderfully mordant ending to 'College.' The first time I watched it, I sat unbelieving for a minute--did I just see what I think I saw?--then laughed in delight. I still smile when I think of it.

Re: What is the best Buster Keaton movie

My favorite is Seven Chances. It never stops moving (a real "motion" picture) and gathers energy as it progresses. And it's hilarious!

I think his best is Sherlock, Jr. - inventive, clever, funny, true genius.

My next favorites are Steamboat Bill, Jr. and The Cameraman.

"The answers to all of life's riddles can be found in the movies."

Re: What is the best Buster Keaton movie

It's either The General or Sherlock, Jr. from what I've seen.

Re: What is the best B Keaton movie

Right
Wouldn't that be a treat
to watch many B Keaton movies
to figure out what's his best of the lot

One after another
you can't go wrong
watching B Keaton

Even his shorts
are well worth the look

♪ Not even Mad Scientists
get it right every time

Re: What is the best B Keaton movie

It is amazing watching these movies, even if it is technically for a job. I am learning more from simply watching these movies than I ever did in school. Also, I am more happy and entertained than I have ever been in my life. Buster Keaton was a pleasant surprise for me back in April and I have now seen about a dozen of his films in the last six months. I wish I could have seen these movies on the big screen when they first came out, but they are still classic on the small screen. Any recommendations as far as his short films?

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Re: What is the best B Keaton movie

Ya gotta see "COPS", it's Buster against the authorities. Then, there's that one where he and his bride are trying to build a house near a train track.
*Any film with him in a boat is worth watching.
Of course, there's the "Fatty Arbuckle" series; Buster is seen *laughing in "Coney Island".

Re: What is the best Buster Keaton movie

I hate to be so conventional, but I have to go with The General. Steamboat Bill, Jr is a close second, though.

And two hard boiled eggs.

Re: What is the best Buster Keaton movie

I'm torn between two - Our Hospitality is for me his funniest and most consistently delightful, but Sherlock Jr. is his most innovative and intoxicating:

The trade ads screamed `More laughs than sprockets holes,' and for once with Buster Keaton's second feature, the magnificent Our Hospitality, they weren't over-selling it. The first of his `Southern trilogy' of epic comedies (followed by The General and Steamboat Bill, Jr.), it shows traces of his more morbid side in taking the murderous and tragic Hatfield-McCoy feud and relocating it from the Appalachians to Kentucky and coming out with a genuinely charming and delightful comedy that's also one of the plain nicest films ever made. The plot is simple but sturdy, with Buster the last survivor of a family wiped out by a petty feud no-one can remember he cause of. Returning to his birthplace after twenty years, he not only discovers that his inheritance is a broken down shack but that the girl he has fallen for is the daughter of the clan who killed his father - and they're eager to finish the job. And if that wasn't enough, he finds himself invited to dinner with them, unaware of their identity...

The story is so slight it's less a three act structure than a three sequence structure, yet the result is Keaton's most perfectly realised feature, with just enough story for the film to stand up but plenty of room for him to build prolonged comedy situations and milk them for all they're worth without ever seeming to break a sweat. The first section of the film boasts his most imaginative and sustained comic setpiece, the wonderfully picaresque train journey in the old Rocket locomotive and its 18th century-style carriages, Buster's faithful dog following and eventually overtaking the prototype loco as the `mighty iron beast' tears across the countryside, locals either assembling to watch it as if it were the most popular show in town or throwing stones at the driver in the hope that he'll throw firewood back at them. Hats, mules, tunnels, smoke and some very uneven tracks are also put into service in a succession of inventive and charming sight gags, while Gordon Jennings and Elgin Lessley's photography and Fred Gabourie's art direction gives the film an unforced visual charm to frame the comedy without overwhelming it.

It's the standout sequence, but the film has plenty more to enjoy, whether it's Buster trying to escape from his hosts while all too aware that they'll shoot him the moment he leaves the front door (southern hospitality prevents them from shooting him while a guest in their home), a chase that sees him tied to a man who is trying to shoot him, a defiantly politically incorrect joke involving a wifebeater and a triumphantly exciting waterfall rescue that still impresses even if you know how it was done. Throughout Keaton abandons some of the more surreal visual touches of his earlier shorts or his later Sherlock Jr. to stand back and let the story and jokes flow naturally, but he still takes the opportunity to throw in a few neat moments of visual trickery like a cunningly disguised horse. Even simple moments like Buster riding a vintage bicycle raise a smile in a film that's just a joy to watch.


The short - a very tight 44 minutes - but very sweet Sherlock Jr. is perhaps Buster Keaton's most perfectly realised film, and the one that more than any other establishes him as cinema's equivalent of Rene Magritte with its dreamlike surrealism. With most of its running time given over to a dream sequence where Buster's projectionist not only imagines himself the hero of the movie he's showing but also clearing his name of the real-life petty crime he's been wrongly accused of, it gives full vent to his wild comic imagination without having to worry too much about a plot that actually makes sense. There's a lot more to it than the justly famous scene of Buster trapped in the constantly changing locations of a movie he's literally walked into, with the film showing a canny awareness of how movies were beginning to shape people's perceptions and dreams - Buster even takes hints on making out from what's happening on screen - and the way that people often live vicariously through the fantasies that unfolded on the silver screen.

As Buster's great detective effortlessly thwarts all efforts to kill him with booby traps, poison and, best of all, an explosive billiard ball, the film runs through some of his most amazing stunts and trickshots, from the train sequence that saw him nearly breaking his neck and causing years of migraines (but not realising it until x-rays in the 30s revealed the fractures), a breathtaking chase with him sitting on the handlebars of a driverless motorbike to the scene where he jumps through Ford West, disguised as a peddler woman, and onto the other side of a fence. Not all of the gags hold up as well as they could, most notably an elaborately staged mirror gag, but there's so much energy and imagination on display here that it can afford the odd missed beat to allow you to catch your breath before the next big gag.



"Security - release the badgers."

Re: What is the best Buster Keaton movie

I love The General.

Also love Seven Chances, mostly for the ending chase scene but also for car scene. The one where Buster gets into his car, the background changes, he gets out and he's at the new location. It looks like the car never moved. In his biography Buster says other cameramen would see the movie over and over to figure out how he did it. Hint: it took survey equipment.



. . . The Bones tell me nothing.

Re: What is the best Buster Keaton movie

'The General' is a masterpiece, but I think 'The Navigator' is his funniest feature-length film.

However, I don't think any of the silent features delivered laughs as well as the short films like 'The Boat' and 'One Week.'

- You may have come on no bicycle, but that does not say that you know everything.
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