The MoFo Movie Club Discussion: The Cameraman

-Mr. Stone Face

This film marks the beginning and end of Buster Keaton’s career. I can explain; MGM had just taken Keaton under their wing due to his massive success with earlier films such as Sherlock Jr., Our Hospitality, Seven Chances, and of course The General, however they pulled him from director position for whatever cockamamie reason. Also under his new contract, he was to make only the movies he was given, this being the first project. Soon after this film, however, MGM took more and more of his creative control away, either forcing him to do silent films during the talkie era or forcing him to do talkies when he had no experience, and this led to a downfall in his inspired impetus and popularity.



Strangely though, the film was used for many years by MGM as an example of a perfect comedy and, according to IMDb, the studio would get all its directors and producers to watch it and learn. The gags in the film were mostly well-choreographed beforehand, although three scenes were improvised on the spot, those being the miming in Yankee stadium, the scene of Keaton throwing his piggybank around his room, and the utterly brilliant dressing room scene. Keaton grabbed a random crew member who looked appropriately ill-mannered and let the camera roll for one long take as the two men threw themselves into the mini cubicle, unrehearsed, to wing the whole thing first time through.



Also, I thought this was really funny:

“According to Rudi Blesch's biography of Buster Keaton, he came on the set the first day of shooting and, unaware of his reduced status as actor-only, began to "feel" for comedy bits and request props and characters, as he had with his own company. Director Edward Sedgwick took him aside and told Buster that he was undermining his directorial authority. Buster genuinely apologized and faded into the background. Sedgewick couldn't get the set-ups he wanted, couldn't get the actors to understand his direction, and eventually gave up and asked Buster to take over. As quietly as he had left, Buster regained control of the scene. Buster began to call Sedgewick "Junior" and they became fast friends.”



Now, aside from it being a brilliant, well-made comedy, two things struck me upon first viewing. Firstly, the second half of the film, starting with Keaton filming the war in the street and everything following, seems to, without aspiration I don’t think, unapologetically depict was has become of the contemporary media. Secondly, I find it incredibly odd that this is basically Keaton’s last great film before MGM ruining him, and yet his character is suckered into this corporation through, primarily, love (the girl/cinema) and filming a terrible event (war/his following films). What say you, chums?

I have seen The Cameraman at the theatre and a couple of times on cable since then. I've also watched it twice in the last two days. I really don't consider it a Buster Keaton Classic but it does have many classic scenes. One of the reasons I can't consider it a "Buster Keaton Classic" is because some of the best scenes involve the monkey which never would have happened in Buster's independent flicks. Now, I want to make it clear that monkey is damn funny but it is an example of how this is less a Buster movie and more an M-G-M movie. One of the reasons why M-G-M pimps the Buster movies is because they not only seemed to hire Buster to make movies for them but they apparently bought much of his catalogue to reuse for remakes. In this case, it wasn''t necessary since M-G-M made The Cameraman, but they basically retooled it for Red Skelton and called it Watch the Birdie. Before that, they used several gags from Keaton's Our Hospitality and The General in Skelton's A Southern Yankee.



As far as what I consider classic scenes, the wonderful, if all-too-brief, bit at Yankee Stadium would have made a good short if it were stretched out. Anyone who loves and understands baseball can see that Buster knows the game inside and out, and his body language and eye movements are picture perfect. Hopefully you baseball fans will know what St. Louis team was in the American League in 1927, just as my wife Brenda did. Just in case anybody is unclear that the film is set in 1927, the film begins and ends with references to Charles Lindbergh and his historical solo crossing of the Atlantic Ocean during that year and subsequent ticker tape parade in NYC.



As is usual with a Keaton flick, the romance is very sweet, and leading lady Marceline Day (The Beloved Rogue, London After Midnight) is very attractive and lovable as Sally. She shows up right at the beginning of the film and is very helpful in getting him switched over from selling tintype photos for a dime to trying to become a professional newsreel cameraman. However, some of Buster's early work isn't too good, although he seems to invent a technique later used by Leni Riefenstahl in Olympia (!!) and also accidentally incorporates some double exposures in his footage. Unfortunately, this makes him a laughing stock amongst everyone but Sally.



There are other "classic" scenes including the one where Buster and Sally go to the indoor swimming pool (it was called the plunge when I was growing up). Buster has to share a dressing room with a much larger man and ends up in the wrong swimsuit. Then he loses it in the water at just about the time he's surrounded by several young women. Actually though, I'm not sure if anything in the movie tops the Tong War scene near the end which is fast-paced and hilarious at the same time. I can't for the life of me understand why the internet doesn't seem to have tons of images of that scene.



Anyway, I'm already starting to feel as if I'm going overboard here so I'd better stifle myself. I will say that the musical score on my DVD included excerpts from a few famous songs later written but overall it wasn't all that distracting although it seemed to mostly consist of synthesizers or modern keyboards. I do like The Cameraman, but I don't think it ranks with the top tier of Keaton. Those films would include Our Hospitality, Sherlock Jr., Seven Chances, College, Steamboat Bill, Jr., and The General. Now, I'm certainly not trying to turn off anybody from watching it because it's a fun movie and hopefully a stepping stone to some of his other films for some of you. It's just that I give it , but if you know me, that's definitely a positive rating.

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My IMDb page

I know right?

But I'd give it an easy

Once again mark adds all the beef I could never

If anybody is actually paying attention to this thread, I just want to mention that if you have Disc 1 of this DVD to watch The Cameraman, make sure you also watch Spite Marriage. It's a very fun movie with numerous classic scenes on stage and on a yacht on the ocean, among many other locations. I don't really want to spend too much time discussing it in here since it's not the Movie of the Month, but I want to say that I think it's as good as The Cameraman and also worth . M-G-M also remade this one with Red Skelton as I Dood It. You get two solid Buster flicks for one if this is the version you've chosen to watch.

You can also see it here.

http://www.archive.org/details/busterkeatonthecameraman

-Mr. Stone Face

Mark F:

This film marks the beginning and end of Buster Keaton’s career. I can explain; MGM had just taken Keaton under their wing due to his massive success with earlier films such as Sherlock Jr., Our Hospitality, Seven Chances, and of course The General, however they pulled him from director position for whatever cockamamie reason. Also under his new contract, he was to make only the movies he was given, this being the first project. Soon after this film, however, MGM took more and more of his creative control away, either forcing him to do silent films during the talkie era or forcing him to do talkies when he had no experience, and this led to a downfall in his inspired impetus and popularity


Actually one of Keaton's later biographers looked a the box office numbers and it showed all the MGM Keatons did well even the crummy talkies. He lost his job because his drinking incapacitated him (fueled by his unhappiness with the movies he was making where he was inappropriately teamed with Jimmy Durante). The same author's earlier book about Harold Lloyd showed just the opposite for HL except for the first one or two, even though his talkies while uneven are better than Keaton's talkies.

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I've read all the posts here with interest so far. The Cameraman is one of Keaton's films that I don't remember all that well, so I don't have anything to add at the moment. I have a Calculus test on wednesday so my movie watching this past week or so has been sluggish, I plan to check this and Spite Marriage out from the library shortly after my test and hopefully I'll have something to add after that.

I watched the first part of the movie at this site. Yes, it's free and it has an older-fashioned musical score, but the print quality is very bad. Not only that, it seems to run (at least on my computer) too slow which is sort of strange because most people think of silent films as running faster than normal. Silent films were filmed at normal speed and shown at normal speed back in the days they were originally shown in theatres. It's only when the horrible dollar and movie reissues raised their heads that cinema owners started running them faster than normal to be able to show more movies during the day. Then TV started showing them all sped up too because they thought that made them funnier and also maxed out their "time effectiveness".

Anyway, I certainly recommend watching a DVD version. I rented mine through the mail. That TCM DVD comes with two discs and the second one has Buster's first talkie Free and Easy and some Bonus Features. Since I didn't want to watch that movie just now, I only rented Disc One which has nice copies of The Cameraman and Spite Marriage.

Hmmm... maybe I need to participate in this discussion.

Lots of homosexuality in silent comedies (or the appearance of it). In Laurel and Hardy's Liberty they escape from prison and each time they try to change clothes, they are caught and it looks like they are trying to have sex.

Thanks for the info about silent film speeds, mark. And about the filming of the movie and Keaton's alcoholism, wintertriangles and will.

I just re-watched The Cameraman, which I'd seen once before and found pretty forgettable at the time. Looking at it again I appreciate it a lot more, though as with the first time I watched it it's pretty far from my favorite Buster Keaton movies. I also must be a bit softer now because that baseball bit where he thinks he's alone on the field and is acting out the game is really beautiful and kind of haunting to me.

One thing about Keaton which I think I've said elsewhere on the forum, he's always engaging and entering into a between-the-lines back and forth with the audience. Here, it's most obvious in the opening premise: Keaton as a film-maker for hire, which like wintertriangles indicates is a perhaps unintentional, but completely apt note of self-reference. Even more apt for me though are the three bits I noticed where he enters the show and loses himself. First at Yankee stadium where he does his personal performance before the camera pulls back to reveal an audience that he wasn't aware was watching. Then after he rescues and loses the girl and the frame pulls out and abstracts his personal drama into the movie that the monkey is making (and that is later shown to the girl). That's such a common device now! And finally, it's so great that the last we see of him is as he wanders through a "real" drama of Lindberg's parade and confuses it with his own movie.

Keaton's humor is all about this shuffling and abstraction of multiple awarenesses. In other words, it's about the confusion that arises from trying to simultaneously make the movie and live in it, which I think is pretty much one of the central concerns of being human. Keaton was a pioneer in finding popular cinematic expressions for these issues, and that's why he's so important, and still so funny.

mark, do you know if the parade bits were completely staged or was there any location footage used? Just curious.

As for where I place this in Keaton's filmography, I'm not really sure. Not in any particular order, my top ones definitely include Steamboat Bill, Jr., Sherlock, Jr., The General, One Week, The Playhouse, and The Goat.

The opening bits with "ticker tape" were staged for the movie, but the parade at the ending is actual newsreel footage of Lindbergh's parade and you see him and his wife Anne.

Bump for those who "wanted" to see more Buster Keaton.

^^Inorite?

So when should I, or someone, arrange a new poll for movie club?

Whenever you're down.

By the by, I actually still have this, from Netflix, sitting in my room. D'oh.

Finally saw this today. Fantastic. More tomorrow, when I have a bit more time.

Okay. Sorry that I'm so behind on this; once or twice a year I do this thing where I get distracted and end up with three Netflix envelopes gathering dust for a couple months solid, and this is one of 2011's victims. But I saw it on Monday and...I loved it.

I generally assume that older comedies will have bits I appreciate or even smile at, but not too many that actually make me laugh out loud. This is usually the case, at least. But I actu-laughed plenty during The Camerman. I have no structure to my comments, so I'll just list things (mainly, my favorite parts):

• I love, love, love Keaton's "suspicious" look. The best example of it is after he loses his swimsuit and he sees a girl come to the surface who was just underneath it, swimming by him. He eyes her warily with his nose just above the water as she swims away. It's hysterical. I know I've said this before, but I think Keaton's deadpan stare in response to his misfortune is far more modern and forward-looking than Chaplin's energetic exclamations. I may prefer one or another depending on my mood, but I think Keaton's style holds up a little better today.
  
  
• I can dig what Mark says about the monkey not making it a real Keaton film...but hot damn, the monkey stuff completely works. The idea seems all too common now, but I wonder if it was done all that often at the time, at least in this fashion, where the monkey exhibits a curious amount of awareness and intelligence.
  
  I also adore the ridiculous notion that he's on his way to film something and ends up buying a monkey accidentally.
  
  
• Favorite part of the Tong War: when he's filming two guys fighting on the ground, and stops to hand one of them a knife to make it more dramatic.
  
  
• I really like the plot structure; being the typical modern, suspicious moviegoers, my wife and I were able to predict the whole boat/filming twist (and the missing film from the Tong War) pretty early on, but that's probably just because we've been conditioned to try to outguess the movies we watch over the years. It was a simple, elegant way to bring both storylines to a close, and it feels like another one of those things that has since become standard. Which makes perfect sense, given the trivia mentioned above (I devoured all the IMDB stuff, as well) about MGM making other people watch it as an example of the perfect comedy.
  
• Mark makes a great point about the baseball miming. I was reconstructing and translating what he was doing for my wife the whole time. I'm pretty sure he starts off with the bases loaded and no outs, and turns a triple play, completely with a rundown between third and home.
  

Oh, and breaking the bed rather than the bank is just timeless comedy. We'll be seeing variations on that bit forever.

Really dug this. It's not The General, but I found it a little "tighter." . Great choice!

Where can I get a monkey like that!? Y'all definitely like the classics!

Bump.