Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton?

Here is Harold Lloyd in his most famous scene. No stuntman and no back screen projection. He really is climbing up that building and hanging on to that clock. He isn't as high up as it seems because the building is on a hill and precautions were made to prevent him from falling. Still, there is no way in hell they would film something like that today. Some say Lloyd was depended on stunts to get laughs and wasn't funny in himself. It isn't true. He had a very expressive face and wasn't very below the skills of Chaplin and Keaton in his ability to take funny acrobatic falls. He was also the most successful of the Chaplin imitators before he created his Glasses character.


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That's it! I'm going on a Chaplin streak and following it with a Keaton streak.

This is the best idea I've had in ages.

I voted for Keaton. It wasn't a very hard choice for me. I've only seen one Langdon film. Stan 'The Man' Wilson also comes to mind .

Chaplin and Lloyd are both excellent as well.

I second mark's recommendations for Steamboat Bill, Jr. and The Goat. My favorite of his shorts remains The Playhouse

You should really go check out some of Keaton's stuff on YouTube... Buster never used a stunt double... so everything you see is really him... and his camera men had orders (from Keaton) to keep shooting until he yelled cut or was killed...

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Keaton's most famous stunt gag. The house frame had to be weighted down so it fell right and if it went wrong, Keaton would have been killed.

I think Chaplin and Keaton are both brilliant, have to go with Chaplin but its a hard choice.

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Didn't it weigh somewhere around 2 tons?

I've seen Lloyd do some falls that outdid even Keaton. One I especially remember, although not the name of the film it's from, is where he's saying goodbye to his girl as she heads down a country road toward home. Keaton is standing there waving until she tops a hill, gives him one last wave, and disappears from sight. At which point Lloyd shinnies up a nearby tree to the first limb where from the raised camera perch behind him, he and we can again see his girl on the trail on the other side of the hill. He yells and waves, she turns and waves back, then disappears again down the trail. At which time Lloyd climbs to the next limb, yells and waves.... This is continued limb by limb until Lloyd is finally seated on the last limb in the top of the tree and his girl has disappeared into the sunset. At which point, the love-happy Lloyd leans back-and falls out of the tree. Not only falls, but he hits and flips around every limb on his way down like one of those old-fashion kiddie toys where a monkey clambers down a ladder each time you turn the ladder upside down. It is one of the most gut-bustable laughable scenes ever put on film, and had to be hard as hell to do without breaking his neck!

I have yet to see anything from Keaton. I suppose The General would be a good starting place.

I love Buster Keaton, he's perhaps my favorite film person of all.

Chaplin was a talented man too, there are elements of genius about a lot of his films, but his movies usually make me a little bit sick. A great filmmaker I suppose, but I don't think of him as being on the same level.

I'll chose Chaplin coz I have seen lots of films of him but don't know about the buster...

I'm definitely in that "Chaplin is more historically important but I prefer Keaton" camp.

Keaton was not only great in the silent area with the physical comedy. But he just kept working and working, playing oddball parts. And he had a sense of humor about himself, doing many cameos of goofy, deadpan characters. I just caught one of my favorites as a kid, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Just a bit part, but his character is memorable and quirky the whole time he's on the screen. Released the year he died.

A real legend, the kind of which you can genuinely say "they just don't make 'em like that anymore."

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Did you get a chance to check out The General yet? Or any of Keaton's other films?

I don't agree at all with the people who are saying Chaplin is more important and a better film maker while Keaton is merely (?) funnier or a better gag writer. Could someone actually tell me what they think is more important and better about Chaplin's films?

I actually don't even want to argue about which one is/was more important than the other (if either one was) but I would certainly like to hear why Chaplin is so important for film since I haven't watched or thought about his films nearly as much as I have Keaton's.

As for Keaton's "importance" and the quality of his films, I dunno, he completely mastered acting, directing, writing, choreography, editing, manipulating the camera and using special effects very early on.

The structure of his films is often very brilliant and complex. For example his early, almost Rashomon-esque feature Three Ages (1923) which shows the same story three different ways (each in different "ages"). Or His fantastic "show-biz" comedy The Playhouse (1921) which shows a dream or fantasy-play within a play within a film, an idea used by countless others including notables such as W.C. Fields (Never Give a Sucker an Even Break), Powell and Pressburger (The Red Shoes), and Gene Kelly (Singin' in the Rain). The super-brilliant Sherlock Jr. does all sorts of clever things including having the hero jump into a movie (an idea Woody Allen reversed in Purple Rose of Cairo) where he places people he knows from "real life" into stereotypical movie roles. That movie just plays with the feedback relationship between "reality", fantasy and the movies in a bunch of interesting self-referential and nested ways which seem to be showing up now even more than ever in film and tv. Or for great effects go to the cutaway house in Sherlock Jr. as well.

There are some amazing set-pieces using technology and natural environments such as the storm and riverboat in Steamboat Bill, Trains in The General, Ocean liner in The Navigator. Which isn't to say that Chaplin and others didn't come up with their own creative uses of some of these ideas and themes as well (Chaplin's "caught in the gears" bit in Modern Times, for instance, or the storm in [I think] Tramp, Tramp, Tramp starring Harry Langdon...) but for me nothing I've seen in this vein can top the twisted nightmare house that the newlyweds in Keaton's One Week accidentally build for themselves and then try to live in.

Highly important too is the fact that Keaton took all of these things, none of which he actually invented himself (trains, boats, architecture, self-referential storytelling, the relationship between art and life, natural disasters...) and transformed them into uniquely iconic cinema imagery using the camera and his own amazing physicality.

While my next point is perhaps a bit more subtle, I don't think we can underestimate Buster Keaton's impact on the peculiar sensibility of modern humor either. Not just the deadpan serious face itself, that everyone has mentioned; more importantly how he approaches these kind of heady, intellectual ideas such as the solipsistic fantasy world in The Playhouse (somewhat reminiscent of the gag in Being John Malkovich where he enters his own head and sees everyone as himself) in an offhand, jokingly nonsensical manner, and at the same time is completely straight-faced/clueless and humorously self-aware about it. This to me looks like a huge leap in how its influenced our modern notion of humor-through-irony as well as what we see as more modern layered or multi-dimensional acting (where the actor is both playing and commenting on the character they're playing as part of the performance).

I guess if I was forced to say not just who I liked better (and really Keaton is more personally important and fundamental for me and my own imagination than perhaps any other film-maker) but who was better I'd still go with Keaton, but I'm really not trying to even get into that. I'd just like to see from someone who chose Chaplin what they would say are the aspects of his films and ideas that are important and why they like him the best.

I'm not trying to invalidate that choice just saying why I think Keaton's great. It's hard to avoid hyperbole but in this case it's actually warranted.

Lines, you make some excellent and valid points. Until I glanced again at Keaton's filmography in IMDB, I didn't appreciate how much work he'd done as a director and writer.

My memory of film history classes is that Chaplin is usually the subject of a chapter and Keaton is a sidebar. I think this derives from Chaplin's later work, in which he tackled serious themes in works such as The Dictator and Modern Times. Whether right or wrong, I think this is the perception, and I think that's what I (and I think others) were getting at -- that Chaplin's reputation ranks higher among those who judge these things.

I don't count myself in that group! I just get a lot of joy of watching Keaton, and that's good enough for me.

What about addin' Lloyd to the poll?
Well, to my mind Keaton has a better charisma. Besides he's the best stunt actor ever born! Well, I haven't seen the full filmography of both actors though...

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It's a very small sample size, but I do prefer Keaton over Chaplin. Sherlock Jr. and The General were 2 of the best silents I've seen. There is just something missing for me with Chaplin, at least in City Lights and Modern Times.

I prefer Keaton because he was a better pure gagwriter, but Chaplin was certainly more popular in their lifetime and more successful and if Chaplin had not become the first comedian superstar there may not have been Keaton.

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Was planning on making this thread but hey its already here!
Now very recently my favorite silent film became Busters "Sherlock Jr." whith was an absolute gem. And since I haven't gone to in depth in either feature film filmography. But I do know in general I laugh more in the works of Chaplin. His clumsiness on set is something unique that no one can recreate. In most cases I haven't found Keaton as laugh out loud funny, while with Chaplin in pretty much all cases whether it were his shorts or full films I was laughing the full way through. Both are brilliant actors, but I gotta give this one to Charlie.

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I see that the thread is quite old but nevertheless, would like to express my opinion as well. It seems that I have watched all of Chaplin`s major works (you know, The Kid, City Lights, Limelight, The Gold Rush, The Circus, Monsieur Verdoux, The Great Dictator). I really enjoyed them. But from Buster Keaton`s works I have seen only one which is The General. However, I can say that The General has produced a really strong impression on me, it was great and thrilling to see how Keaton played performing all the stunts by himself. But what I really want to say is that I love Chaplin for the stories told in his films but The General is a dynamic movie which has you get absorbed via great action.

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