Joseph Frank Keaton, nicknamed Buster after a remark the famous magician Harry Houdini is alleged to have made when the six-month-old baby took a fall down a flight of stairs, was born in a boarding house in Piqua, Kansas, and entered show business at the age of three performing with his father and mother as AThe Three Keatons.@ The rough and tumble act was a headliner and performed on the same bill as many of the notables of the great age of vaudeville.Basically self-educated, Keaton, like most theatrical people of the period, had a low opinion of the Aflickers,@ but as his father=s alcoholism grew on him, Keaton decided to strike out on his own and drifted into the movies.
            On Buster=s first visit to the Comique Film Corporation in March 1917, he immediately struck up a close friendship with Roscoe AFatty@ Arbuckle and canceled his $250.00 a week theatrical contract for $40.00 a week with Arbuckle. It was probably the only good business deal Keaton ever made.
            Keaton took to movie making like a duck to water. Fascinated by the technical aspects of moviemaking, Keaton made fifteen two-reel films with Arbuckle from 1917 through 1920. Keaton=s artistic growth was rapid, and he soon abandoned Arbuckle=s roughhouse style for more subtle comedy. Keaton=s first feature film, The Saphead (1920), although based upon a popular Broadway play, is a mature work. Keaton had now permanently abandoned broad comedy for more subtle gags in which the humor was allowed to build and in which his stoic sensitivity could shine forth through his seemingly unexpressive face.
            Now on his own, Keaton made a series of two-reel films which, although uneven, contain some of his best work: The High Sign (1921, after being withheld from release for a year because of Keaton=s unhappiness with it), One Week, Convicts 13, The Scarecrow, Neighbors (all 1920), The Haunted House, Hard Luck, The Goat, The Playhouse. The Boat (all 1921), The Paleface, Cops, My Wife=s Relations, The Blacksmith, (the first Keaton film I ever saw), The Frozen North (the most bizarre of all Keaton=s films), The Electric House, Daydreams (all 1922), The Balloonatic, The Love Nest (all 1923).
            With The Three Ages (1923), Keaton moved permanently into feature films. Although planned frugally to be released as three two-reel films if necessary, The Three Ages was a success, and Keaton, now totally in charge of his own films followed it with Our Hospitality (1923), Sherlock Jr., considered by many critics his finest film, The Navigator, which was Keaton=s personal favorite (both 1924), Seven Chances, Go West (1925), Battling Butler (1926), The General and College (1927), Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928).
            After Buster Keaton Productions and Joseph Schenck, who had allowed Keaton total control, were bought out by MGM, Keaton slowly lost control of both his film and his life and began a long and sad decline.Although The Cameraman (1928) and Spite Marriage (1929) have moments of greatness, Keaton=s work as a filmmaker of genius was essentially finished with the coming of sound.
            The causes of Keaton=s decline have been much discussed, and certainly studio spite and Keaton=s lack of business sense contributed, but alcoholism seems almost certainly to have been the chief cause. Slowly, however, Keaton pulled himself out of the pit and sobered up. With television and a new interest in silent films, his fame began to revive, and by the time of his death from lung cancer, he was already being classed with Chaplin as the greatest of the silent clowns. Since the restoration of all of Keaton=s major works of the silent period by Film Preservation Associates in 1995, Keaton can now be appreciated at his true worth.
            A great American artist, free from affectation and pretension, he is a comic of the open air stoic, yet eternally hopeful, his beautiful face turned toward us with that quality of alert responsiveness we have so often seen in him. The society has absorbed him, as Whitman said that it would absorb the greatest Americans.