SEPTEMBER 23, 1964
THE MAN IN THE PORK PIE HAT is unhappy. His head down, arms akimbo, he paces grimly as a documentary crew captures him on film.
“What happened?” he is asked from off camera. “Didn’t he tell you what he was going to do?”
“No, I didn’t know he shifted gags on me.”
“What did you expect it was going to be?”
Buster Keaton strikes a match, shielding it from the wind as he lights a cigarette. “I thought I was going to be fouled up with the map ’cause I decided that last night. And he decided not to. I didn’t know it.”
The setting is a trestle spanning the Little Saskatchewan Valley, a bridge that, when it was built, was the longest of its kind in Western Canada. On its single track, Keaton, in his by-now-familiar costume of hat, coat, vest, and string tie, is to be piloting a “speeder,” a little two-cylinder track car that carries him along at speeds of up to thirty miles an hour. The question is what he should be doing as he crosses the trestle, which rises some ninety feet above the valley floor. His director, animator Gerald Potterton, has asked that he cross while doing his laundry, the idea being that he never leaves the moving vehicle from the time he boards it on the coast of Nova Scotia until he reaches Vancouver and the Pacific Ocean, a journey of more than 3,800 miles. Keaton, however, thinks he should be bunched up in a map so that his character isn’t aware he is in danger.
The idea had taken form the previous day. “Beautiful trestle bridge,” said Potterton as he entered Keaton’s private car, a seven-compartment sleeper on loan from Canadian National Railways. Gerry Potterton and a company of nine were in the middle of making a twenty-four-minute color subject for the National Film Board called The Railrodder. Simultaneously, a 16mm documentary on the making of the film was being shot under the title Buster Keaton Rides Again. Potterton and his cameraman, Robert Humble, had made an advance trip in August in which the men identified likely settings for their breezy travelogue, and the historic trestle just outside Rivers offered the chance for any number of gags.
Keaton had an idea: “Now, I get out the map. Once I get it pretty well open and the wind catches it, it’s going to wrap around me. So I cross that trestle wrapped up in a paper, standin’ up in the car, fightin’ the paper.”
Potterton was apprehensive. “I’ll tell you the locality is fine…” he hedged, hoping to change the subject. Keaton was a master of physical comedy, and racing along a trestle in an open car didn’t begin to approach some of the signature stunts he had done over his long career. But he was also just days from his sixty-ninth birthday and, though solidly built, in fragile health.
“It might be the funniest way to do it,” Keaton mused.
“There’s another thing come along,” said Potterton, pointing out the window. “See those little houses over here?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, in those houses live little speeders, about six of them.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Imagine this: a long shot of the bridge, and suddenly, from left to right, three or four of these other little box speeders all come over—ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch—”
“That’s a single-track trestle?”
“Yeah, single track. Yeah. They go across—ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch—slight hold, and they all reverse, going like mad—ch-ch-ch-ch—and you’re there, waving them on.”
“You mean I chase them off.”
“Chase them off. Next shot, you cut to those little houses. The four guys come in very quickly, stop, take them off the tracks, and you just—whoosh!—shoot through. And that’s the sequence.”
“And they all look out at the same time.”
“Yes, exactly.”
Keaton, though, was not easily dissuaded. “I don’t know why,” he said, “but I like that—cleaning house, I get out the map to look at it just as I hit the trestle. Gettin’ on it and gettin’ scared is not gonna mean anything.”
“I’ll get my pad because I want to draw it, and I’ll show you what we’re going to do.” Potterton begins to sketch the scene. “This is the shot with the bridge. We get the valley like that, this damn great big bridge…”
“Why aren’t these two gags the same thing?” wondered Keaton, acting it out. “I don’t know. I put my broom down and everything else. ‘Now I wonder where I am?’ Out with the map, and once I get it opened, I’m helpless. Well, now your shot goin’ across that trestle is all the funnier—I’m chasin’ ’em but fightin’ the paper at the same time.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m fightin’ the paper and goin’ past, and four heads come out and look. I don’t know I’ve chased ’em out. I don’t know I’ve crossed a dangerous place either. They don’t feel like bein’ run into, so it’ll all work out.”
It was a test of wills between a fledgling director and a world-renowned comedian, the sort of match that in Hollywood wouldn’t end well for a young man with just one live-action short to his credit. But Keaton was never one to throw his weight around, even at times when the quality of the picture was at stake. He would grouse, pace, complain, but in the end he would do what he was told, even when he knew it was wrong.
Buster Keaton was a gentle soul, so quiet and unassuming it was easy to forget he had been making the world laugh since the age of five. On-screen, he was a tabula rasa of emotionless energy onto which audiences could project their own aspirations, triumphs, and misfortunes. To James Agee, his unsmiling face ranked with Lincoln’s as an early American archetype—“haunting, handsome, almost beautiful, yet it was irreducibly funny.” The French called him “Malec,” the Poles “Zbysco,” and in Iceland he was known as “Glo-Go.” At some point the Great Stone Face ceased being a work of nature as defined by Nathaniel Hawthorne and attached itself to him so thoroughly it could easily have been his legal name.
Keaton’s authority on the set of The Railrodder comes not only from his stature as one of the screen’s great silent clowns—in the opinion of many, greater even than Charlie Chaplin—but also as a world-class filmmaker with a string of nineteen short comedies and twelve masterful features to his credit. Just prior to the start of shooting, in fact, the Railrodder company, along with NFB staff and friends, squeezed into the Film Board’s Theatre 3 in Quebec’s Saint-Laurent borough to witness the showing of a movie Keaton had co-written and directed in 1926. The General, another story about trains and the tracks that carry them, was Keaton’s masterpiece, easily the most ambitious comedy feature of the entire silent era, a film that would eventually come to dominate the Sight & Sound critics’ poll as the greatest comedy of all time. And thirty-three-year-old Gerald Potterton was charged with directing the man who made it.
“What makes it tough,” Keaton tells the documentarians, “is that I can’t match scenes…’cause I didn’t have it in my mind that way. I don’t know….If I went back now to protect this chase in close-ups, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea what I was doin’ at the time I should be doin’ it. So we can’t make scenes match.”
Cut to Gerry Potterton. “Don’t forget there’s still two other shots to go to complete the sequence, Buster. There’s a long shot of the bridge, of him going over. That’s the whole center of the gag is that long shot of the bridge.”
“The bridge is not your gag,” Keaton insists. “The bridge is only suspense, a thrill. There’s no gag to the bridge at all. Not a goddamn thing. It’s only a dangerous place to be when there might be a collision. That’s the only thing that’s funny.”
Back in the railcar that doubles as a dressing room, club car, and occasional overnight accommodations, he is playing solitaire.
“Well,” his wife says, “I know the main reason they didn’t want you going over the trestle all wrapped up in newspapers and things…”
“If they took a good look, the scene we did is a worthless scene. The scene can’t be used. So it’s a nice scene to have sometime when you’re going to show it to friends or somethin’ like that. You don’t use it in the picture.”
“[Gerry] said it was too dangerous.”
“I sez, ‘Who suggested the gags?’ He says, ‘You did.’ I sez, ‘I generally know what I’m doin’.’ ” Impatiently: “That is not dangerous. That’s child’s play, for the love of Mike.”
“Don’t tell me about that.”
“I told them. I do worse things in my sleep than that.”
“I know.”
“In my own backyard with a swimmin’ pool I take more chances than that.”
Jo Kirkpatrick, the unit business manager, holds up a prop map, fully eight feet square. “Here’s the map,” she says. “It’s terribly strong.”
“I’d like that to look like it was a big sail goin’ [across the bridge].”
“And you won’t fall off?”
“No, certainly not. I took more chances washin’ clothes doin’ it because my feet were sliding all over the place in that car.”
He returns to his cards.
“Any time you’re shootin’ gags or laying ’em out in advance, you’ll so often run into guesswork. ‘Well, maybe his way is better than doin’ it mine.’ Then you try to sell yourself one way or the other because there is a certain amount of guess. Has to be. But every now and then there ain’t no guesswork. This is one of ’em.”
Two days later, they are back at the trestle to do the scene Keaton’s way. “I was quite happy with him doing his washing,” said Potterton, laughing. “I liked him doing his washing.” Still, he had to admit the logic in Keaton’s reasoning: “With the map, it did work with the idea that he was out there in the middle of the Manitoba wilderness, that he’s looking at it. He takes that big map out to see where he’s going.” The bit with the washing would remain, but Keaton is no longer zipping across the bridge when he does it. “That whole gag was built on the premise that after all this clear running from east to west, suddenly there are guys coming towards him on the line, the little workmen on that bridge, and the gag was that he would be completely unaware of those guys as they were waving to each other, Go back! Go back to your little sheds! The idea was that he would shoot by, sit down, perfectly unaware that he’d been in mortal danger.”
It was a theme that had followed Keaton from his earliest work on-screen—his utter cluelessness in the presence of disaster, as if an impending holocaust existed on a completely separate plane. He is guileless, but he is also an adult, not an overgrown child as so many comics present themselves. He was, as Walter Kerr would write, the most silent of silent comedians, immobile as in a sense of alert repose, but whose intuitions about the nature of man in the universe were as perceptive as they were simple. “His pictures are motion pictures. Yet, though there is a hurricane eternally raging about him, and though he is often fully caught up in it, Keaton’s constant drift is toward the quiet at the hurricane’s eye.”