Le caméraman

This is a fine comedy, nearly as good as some of the earlier masterpieces that Keaton had made on his own. It starts off rather slowly, but gets better and better as it moves along, leading up to a great finish that is fully worthy of Keaton's genius.

The setup, with Buster as a cameraman who desperately yearns to break into the newsreel business, lends itself well to visual gags and also provides Buster with the kind of hard-luck character which he always portrayed so convincingly and humorously. The early parts do move slowly at times, aside from a few good gags - but Keaton apparently once said that there was some good material in the original film that has not survived because the negatives deteriorated (this seems likely, because there are some noticeable blemishes even in what is left in the prints on the current video version). Even so, it picks up steam and gets steadily funnier as the situation and Keaton's character are developed.

And it all leads up to a typically great Keaton finale, a wonderful blend of humor, excitement, drama, and fun visuals. It's fully as satisfying as the finishes in his best films, and any Keaton fan should find it thoroughly enjoyable.

Buster Keaton plays a kind hearted but bumbling cameraman trying his best to win over a clerk at MGM studios. Despite his best efforts, hilarious mishaps keep getting in the way. Among the funnier skits, A San Francisco Tong war, getting stuck in a dressing room with another man, and his constant antics with a local police officer. The film tugs your heart strings as you wish nothing but the best for this poor man. Strongly recommended if you like a light hearted and family friendly films everybody can enjoy. Fans of Charlie Chaplin and the Three Stooges will find Buster Keaton's work to be a breath of fresh air and even though it's a silent film, no sound is needed to appreciate everything this film has to offer.

This was the first film Buster Keaton did at MGM after his financial backer, Joe Schenck, withdrew his support. It was also the last feature film in which Buster Keaton had creative control. In it, Buster plays a photographer making tin types on a street corner for passerbys. Some dignitaries appear, a crowd gathers around them, and as a result he is pressed up against a girl (Marceline Day) in the crowd until the dignitaries leave and the crowd disperses. She doesn't notice him, but he's instantly smitten. His face says it all.

He looks for the girl, Sally, and finds she is working as a secretary for MGM newsreels. He figures that the way to impress her and also a way to be around her all day is to become a cameraman himself. She tells him he will need to have a camera of his own if he wants a job there. So he withdraws every dime he has in the bank and buys an old run down camera. What follows are his awkward attempts to get the girl with his awkward attempts at being a newsreel cameraman.

The best way to describe The Cameraman is that it is a series of vignettes and gags that could entertain if you just watched them individually, but work together to the final conclusion. Accidental skinny dipping, a gang war, an impromptu solo baseball game, and an organ grinder monkey who made a better side kick for Buster than Jimmy Durante could have ever hoped to be are among the disparate situations that fuel the gags. And if you think that you recognize some of these gags as being lifted and placed in1935's "A Night at the Opera" with the Marx Brothers, you would be right.

MGM was a movie factory, and the fact that the actual script of The Cameraman is hard to describe drove the studio heads crazy, even though it was a box office success. But MGM learned the wrong lesson - That Buster Keaton was well suited to being a star plugged into their formulaic movie making. They stole Buster's independence and put resentment in its place, and that resentment grew with each film he did, ultimately leading to personal and professional disaster.

Seeing THE CAMERAMAN for the first time in pristine condition (thanks to TCM) and with a wonderful musical score to keep the pace going for the audience members not used to a steady diet of silent films, I was quite surprised. While THE CAMERAMAN does not really feature any incredible or death-defying stunts, there are a number of set pieces that provide exciting humor (the staircase sequence, for instance), and also some hilarious situations such as when he loses his bathing suit at the "municipal plunge" or when he has to protect his camera from the attackers during the tong war. Thankfully, MGM had not yet put Keaton in films that did not fit his established persona (SIDEWALKS OF NEW YORK) or that did not take advantage of his particular comic gifts (FREE AND EASY). Keaton is wonderful throughout, charismatic, sympathetic, agile. Marceline Day is a charming female lead and actually makes a three-dimensional character out of what could have been a superficial role in other hands. She continued working into the sound era until the mid-30s, but wound up in poverty-row features (see my review of SUNNY SKIES, where she is teamed with Rex Lease and Benny Rubin), many of which I've really enjoyed over the years (MYSTERY TRAIN with Hedda Hopper, the pioneering women-in-war film FORGOTTEN WOMEN/THE MAD PARADE, the VD classic DAMAGED LIVES, the outrageous camp classic THE FLAMING SIGNAL with Noah Beery, Henry B. Walthall, and Flash the dog, and the superb urban melodrama BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. The multi-talented Harry Gribbon, who began working for Mack Sennett in the teens, is well-used as the omnipresent cop who happens to be wherever Buster is doing something that looks fishy out of its proper context. I've been watching some of his sound comedy shorts recently such as RURAL ROMEOS and BIG HEATED, and he was superb as an arrogant bluffer, was a master of mugging and physical comedy, and even sang well in ROMEOS. Overall, THE CAMERAMAN is well worth watching and shows that initially Keaton was able to work well within MGM's system. Things began to slip with his next MGM feature, SPITE MARRIAGE, although many of the MGM features have something worthwhile in them (see my review of WHAT NO BEER, his last, and often considered his worst). With the recent attention given to the MGM films, I think I'll watch some of them again. From my memories of watching them about a decade ago, I remember DOUGHBOYS as being the least funny and most labored.

What a delightfully wacky world our Buster inhabited. This one, his first MGM feature, the beginning of the end one might safely say, is about a hapless would-be newsreel photographer trying to get a foothold within MGM, mostly in order to win the sweet girl in the front office. Lost of footage in 'Cameraman' is rather less than vintage Keaton, some jokes aren't as fresh as one would wish, but hey, listen, this is Keaton, the great stoneface. A Deity. Because other footage is simply brilliant. The pathetic pictures of Buster sitting in his little room from the crack of dawn in all his Sunday best, waiting for the girl to maybe ring. When it does ring he has to rush four stories down to get it! Or the scene where he has to share his dressingroom with another gent and their clothes and limbs get tangled up with each other. Or, most spectacularly, the (location?) scenes from the gangwar in Chinatown, dynamic, violent, imaginative. See it, love it - just just expect another 'General' or 'Sherlock' or 'Scarecrow' or 'Steamboat Bill' or 'Battling Butler'.