Two new books about a legendary silent film comic — Dana Stevens' Camera Man and James Curtis' Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker's Life — give fans new reason to revisit Keaton's work.

Transcript

DON GONYEA, HOST:

There are two new books about silent film great Buster Keaton. In "Keaton: A Filmmaker's Life," James Curtis offers a detailed portrait of the comedian who smiled so seldom he was known as the Great Stone Face. And "Camera Man" by Dana Stevens draws a line between Keaton's comedies and the times he lived in. We sent the books to critic Bob Mondello, who all but devoured them, looking for fresh insights about his favorite silent star.

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: Back when I was designing movie ads fresh out of college, a theater I worked for presented a month-long silent clowns festival. It had an organist doing live accompaniment, and every day, a new program, two full-length features and a short subject. And for four glorious weeks, I spent every day watching the great clowns of the silent era strut their stuff. Charlie Chaplin's "Little Tramp" was the one everyone knew best. All-American daredevil Harold Lloyd was the one who made the most money. And Buster Keaton was the genius.

(LAUGHTER)

MONDELLO: According to both authors, Keaton came to slapstick naturally. As a toddler, he kept crawling on stage during his parents' vaudeville act. And his father, noting the laughs he was getting, started staging those interruptions. Buster would tug on dad's pants leg and, barely glancing down as he continued with the act, dad would grab his kid and toss him into the wings, where a stagehand caught him. Where most kids would have giggled at being tossed around, Buster kept a straight face, and audiences howled.

As Buster grew, their roughhousing got rougher. Dad drank quite a bit, and the act became about Buster escaping his father, leaping and somersaulting out of the old man's grasp. By the time he came to film at the age of 21, he was a virtual acrobat.

Now, that background wasn't what made Keaton special. Chaplin also came from vaudeville. So did most film comics. And they all told stories and invented gags, but Keaton figured out early how to manipulate this new medium of film, how to use its flatness and silence for sight gags that would astonish even other filmmakers. While his peers were slipping on banana peels, he'd leap through windows that always seemed to line up uncannily with something unexpected in the street. And when he whacked a grizzly bear over the head with a rifle, it was apt to shoot between his legs on impact and kill a second grizzly that he hadn't realized was behind him. That only works if your world is as flat as the screen and you don't hear the grizzlies.

The new books either dismiss or debunk one of my favorite legends about Keaton, that in real life, when he was still a baby, a cyclone plucked him from a hotel window and deposited him unhurt three blocks away - almost certainly didn't happen. Still, if it had, it would explain a lot, like why his gags on screen so often incorporate a strangely cooperative universe, one that sends a hurricane, say, to blow down the whole front wall of a building on top of him but provides one small open window on an upper floor so he'll emerge unscathed. In "Steamboat Bill Jr.," Keaton wanted that collapse to look real in hurricane-like winds, so he had the wall built of brick and mortar. It weighed almost two tons, which made the stunt so dangerous that even the guy cranking the camera turned his eyes away when they filmed it.

(SOUNDBITE OF GONG)

MONDELLO: The coming of sound and the interference of producers who thought they knew comedy better than he did all but killed Keaton's career when he was barely in his 30s. And that's where my previous knowledge of him ended. The new books deal in large part with what came later. He started drinking. Depression set in. And by the time TV came along, well, at the start of the first episode of 1950's "The Buster Keaton Show," he's seen munching crackers and - old silent film gag - picking up a dog biscuit by mistake. Then the talking starts.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE BUSTER KEATON SHOW ")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Buster, Buster, where are you? So here you are, in the store room. Well, what have you got to say for yourself?

MONDELLO: And the great comics first line on his new show...

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE BUSTER KEATON SHOW ")

BUSTER KEATON: (As self, barking).

MONDELLO: Things did not get better when he actually spoke. The writers gave him a dream about being a private eye.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE BUSTER KEATON SHOW")

KEATON: (As self) And a dame entered. She had two of the most beautiful legs I've ever seen. I know. I counted them.

MONDELLO: It's like they didn't want him to be alone and never smiling. That could have spelled the end for Keaton, whose film negatives were in tatters by that time. Silence was history. His original audience was, too. But just a couple of years later, decent copies of his old comedies surfaced in Europe. And when film festivals took notice and struck fresh prints, a new generation discovered him - discovered the guy who, in "Sherlock Jr.," climbed up onto a screen within a screen and got hilariously tripped up by film edits while teaching audiences about film grammar; who refused to cheat on stunt work, even though it meant breaking more than a dozen bones in pursuit of laughs, including his neck; who made a brilliant civil war epic, "The General," set almost entirely on moving trains, with stunts and gags that no insurance company would allow a movie star today.

Keaton was lucky enough before he died to bask in renewed audience applause. And a generation later at that silent clowns festival I haunted, he was getting seat-shaking laughs from, I guess, the great beyond. Now, his work available online and these books introducing him to a digital generation almost a century after the silent era, Buster Keaton will still prompt a joyful noise from anyone who watches. I'm Bob Mondello.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.