BUSTER KEATON FREE

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.Standard Terms for Purchasing/Returning a Product on Artist Shot The Railrodder, for the National Film Board of Canada (October 2, 1965)įilm, directed by Samuel Beckett (January 8, 1965)Ī Supercut of Buster Keaton’s Most Amazing Stuntsīuster Keaton: The Wonderful Gags of the Founding Father of Visual Comedy The Paleface (January, 1922) (Racist depictions of Native Americans) The Playhouse (October 6, 1921) (This contains a faux minstrel show segment with blackface.)

BUSTER KEATON FREE

Many will be added to our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More. And laugh.”ĭon’t we all need a steady supply of that medicine these days? See Keaton’s classic silent comedy The General further up, see his short “The Ballonist” above, and watch 29 more Keaton films at the links below. But the BFI’s Geoff Andrew argued that it deserved the top spot, and Keaton deserves recognition as “not merely the greatest of the silent comedians,” but “the greatest of all comic actors to have appeared on the silver screen… not only a great American filmmaker of the silent era,” but “one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, anywhere.” Andrew likens him to a god, but “unlike gods… Buster has the advantage of being able to make us laugh. In 2018, The General came in at number 34 on Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films of All Time list.

Since then, Keaton appreciation has become almost a form of worship. His last picture was a return to silent film in Beckett’s 1966 short, “Film,” made the year of his death. After the twenties, his career floundered, then rebounded. For the next decade, until the end of the silent era, he dominated the box office, alongside Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, with his canny blend of daredevil slapstick and everyman pathos. Keaton starred in his first feature-length film, The Saphead, in 1920. In Peter Bogdanovich’s new documentary, The Great Buster: A Celebration, Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner discuss his foundational influence on their comedy, and Werner Herzog calls him “the essence of movies.” (He was the playwright’s first choice to play Waiting for Godot’s Lucky, though he was too perplexed by the script to take the role). He was dubbed “the greatest of all the clowns in the history of the cinema” by Orson Welles, and served as a significant inspiration for Samuel Beckett. Keaton has always been held in the highest esteem by his fellow artists. Not only are most of the stone-faced comic genius’ films available online, but he has maybe eclipsed Chaplin as the most popularly revered silent film star of the 1920s. In 1987, Video magazine published a story titled “Where’s Buster?” lamenting the lack of Buster Keaton films available on videotape, “despite renewed interest” in a legend who was “about to regain his rightful place next to Chaplin in silent comedy’s pantheon.” How things have changed for Keaton fans and admirers.

The greatest of the silent clowns is Buster Keaton, not only because of what he did, but because of how he did it.

Buster keaton