Three Ages

I'd have to rate this as slightly above-average Keaton fare. It shows Buster trying to romance the girl away from Wallace Beery, and what would have transpired if the story had taken place in (1) the Stone Age; (2) The Roman Age, and (3) The Modern Age.

I liked them in that order, too, with more laughs with the older periods of time, although I laughed at the hardest at a couple of segments in the Roman Age. My favorite was the chariot race held in the sand. That had a number of clever things in the segment. The brief bit with the lion was funny, too, sort of a parody of the Biblical story of Daniel in the lion's den.

They were smart only going five minutes or so with each age and then going back with the story each time. Each "age" had four or five segments in total.

Nothing hilarious but definitely worth your time if you are checking out silent film comedies

Although the movie is clearly dated, audiences can still easily identify with the plight of hapless Buster in this timeless and very funny underdog tale. Buster fights against unkindly odds in three different ages: the Stone Age, The Roman Age, and the Moden Age, playing almost the same character with just a change of scenery to help us identify the different "ages". In this movie we see one of the earliest comedic depictions of the "caveman" stereotype, who wins his love not by romance but by brute force, as well as a funny twist on Roman gladiatorial combat, two comedic sketches that long predate such spoofs as Mel Brooks' "History of the World: Part I". The underlying theme of the movie is simple yet convincing: Although the times may have-a-changed, we still face the same struggles even in modern times that we fought in prehistoric times in order to "win the girl" (keep in mind this is the theme of 1923 America, a time when chauvinism was still en vogue). It is interesting to look at this movie over eighty years later, and consider how dramatically things have changed from this movie's "modern times" to now.

The more time I spend with old films, the more of a giant I see Keaton to be. I'm beginning to think that we all need to see a lot of him, which is why I wandered into this. It seems to have been made only because they had access to a Roman set.

The setup is that a courtship story is presented in three eras: a cave-man setup, a Roman context and a modern one. All are based on film notions of those eras of course. Unlike most movie humor of the time, the joke here isn't in embellishing the story with humorous decoration. Its in the difference among the stories.

Its a clever piece of what I call folding, and you will see at least one scene here that I swear is quoted in "Rashomon."

So there's the idea of the thing, which is worthwhile, but now I've explained it, you hardly have to see it. The jokes are trite. But there is one scene that I recall over and over. I think Keaton did it elsewhere and several others too, but here it is the best.

He's driving a car, a rickety one to his girl's house. (This is in the modern setting, obviously.) He hits a bump and the car falls to pieces. And I just don't mean the wheels fall off, the car quite literally disassembles into the parts that went into the factory and there he sits among hundreds of items. I have no idea how he did this. The car really is moving as a car, and then in an instant it is in pieces.

Wonderful.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Loosely intended as a satire of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, The Three Ages was Buster Keaton's first attempt at a full length comedy feature. The only similarities to Intolerance are the opening "book" scene and the fact that similar stories through the ages are edited together into a complete film. Keaton's reasoning for appropriating this style was that if it didn't succeed as a feature film, it could be reduced to three two-reelers. Fortunately, The Three Ages succeeds brilliantly as a comedy and contains some of the funniest routines I've seen in any of Keaton's film. There is nothing unique or daring about the story lines. They are simple boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl plots, but the period satires are riotous and set the standard for future works by Mel Brooks and all films of this genre. However, I don't believe that anyone has ever topped this comedy. No one can play the lovable goof like Keaton and the stunts in this film are some of his best. In addition, Wallace Beery's appearance as Keaton's rival adds to this film's appeal. Anyone who thinks that comedy from the 1920's cannot be appreciated by modern audiences needs to see this movie.

Buster presents love stories from three periods in history - the Stone Age, the Roman Age, and the Modern Age. In each, he vies for the affection of a young woman with another man, thus illustrating that emotions like love and jealousy have been constant for time immemorial, a contrast to what D. W. Griffith was trying to highlight in Intolerance, which Buster was parodying.

While the three stories are interleaved together, it's notable that at a 63 minute runtime, this is essentially three two-reel shorts put together. As Keaton put it, "Cut the film apart and then splice up the three periods, each one separately, and you will have three complete two-reel films."

The Stone Age story has lots of gags that The Flintstones would later borrow, such as prehistoric golfing, taking dictation by chiseling into a stone, and presenting a business card comprised of a small slab of rock with a crude likeness drawn on it. Buster standing atop a dinosaur, despite the bad science and primitive stop-motion effects, made me smile. The best moment, however, was when he tries to arouse jealousy in his beloved by attempting to grab another woman by the hair and take charge of her, only to find she's at least a foot taller than him. She knocks him off the rock and we get that marvelous shot of him look up into the camera on the way down to a pond below, kissing his fingers before spreading his arms wide.

The Roman Age story has a lot of the same types of visual gags, like a wristwatch made with a sundial, Buster playing an impromptu game of craps with dice with Roman numerals on the sides, and him pulling his chariot up to a "No parking" sign in Latin (naturally, mistranslating Non Postum Exit). The best gag was when he engages in a chariot race in the hippodrome using one pulled by dogs. When one starts slowing down, he replaces it like a spare tire with another that's stashed in his trunk, which was hilarious.

The Modern Age of "speed, need, and greed" features some amusing moments on the gridiron, like Buster being propped up by an opponent so he can be knocked down each play, and handing the ball off when he's about to be creamed on a punt return. There's also a clever getaway shot from above where he goes through one taxi to another faced in the opposite direction, and when the two cabs drive off, his pursuers think he's in the first. Nothing tops that extraordinary leap from one building to another, however, where Buster missed the jump in real life. While there was a safety net 35 feet below him, he hit it hard and awkwardly enough that he injured his knees, hips, and elbows, and had to stay in bed for several days afterwards. How he then improvised the awnings and slid into the fire department was brilliant, and "the biggest laughing sequence in the picture...because I missed it in the original trick," as he put it.

Overall the film wasn't helped by being so drawn out as the pace of the jokes probably could have been faster, but there's a lot to like here. Pretty cute ending too.