CAMERA MAN

A film critic assesses the career and times of one of the geniuses of cinema.

“Keep your eye on the kid,” Joe Keaton wrote in an ad tagline in 1901, and was he ever right. That kid, his 6-year-old son Buster, was the star of the family stage act The Three Keatons, “the child star as prop, as projectile, as the personal belonging of a father who casually employs him as a household cleaning tool.” He was also a natural performer who revolutionized cinema with his silent films of the 1920s before bad business decisions, alcoholism, and changing times brought him down. In this erratic book, Slate film critic Stevens describes the high and lows of Keaton’s life—his early success in Roscoe Arbuckle’s two-reel comedies, triumph with his own studio, disastrous association with MGM, three marriages—while addressing societal events of the day such as child abuse in textile mills, women’s rights, and Black culture. Yet the author doesn’t flesh out these larger events, and attempts to connect Keaton to them are often misguided. Stevens rightly bemoans the poor treatment of women in the cinema of that era, so it’s odd she doesn’t note that many lead actresses in Keaton’s great films—Sybil Seely in One Week, Kathryn McGuire in The Navigator, Marion Mack in The General—more than hold their own and are every bit the Keaton character’s equal. The author devotes eight pages to Spite Marriage, a 1929 MGM mediocrity Keaton didn’t control, but she provides far less detail about Our Hospitality, Go West, and other superior films where Keaton was in charge. Stevens devotes more space to Charlie Chaplin’s 1952 Limelight, a plodding film in which Keaton has only a small role, than some of Keaton’s directorial gems. Readers hungry for details of how Keaton made his pictures should look elsewhere.

An appreciative but wildly uneven look at a brilliant filmmaker.