Charles Wolfe

INTRODUCTION: Keaton in context

The papers collected in this special issue on Buster Keaton share a commitment to locating the work of the now legendary comic actor and director within historically specific contexts. Drawing on various kinds of primary documents, and alert to wider social and cultural patterns, the authors emphasize the performance traditions, stylistic and genre conventions, and conditions of production and reception that informed Keaton’s work at different stages of his career. Coverage encompasses not only Keaton’s well-known silent comedies from the 1920s but his early performances as a child star in vaudeville (historical accounts of which have been largely anecdotal) and his later appearance in talkies (which have tended to play a marginal role in Keaton criticism). On occasion the authors introduce new frames of references for explaining the significance of different periods or dimensions of Keaton’s career, rejecting or revising accounts that have heretofore held sway. Several papers demonstrate the benefits of deep research into the generic precedents and institutional practices accompanying the making and marketing of particular comic routines or films. Close study of the scrapbook kept by Keaton’s mother, for example, allows Peter Krämer to analyze audience response to the family’s popular vaudeville act, and the tactics employed by Keaton’s father to exploit, and fend off criticism of, its violent qualities. Kevin Sweeney queries received commentary on the debt of Keaton’s Three Ages to D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, surveying a much wider range of films that experimented with a multiple-plot format leading up to the making of Keaton’s first feature, and persuasively demonstrates that, standard accounts notwithstanding, Three Ages could never have been expediently reassembled into three separate shorts films. Based on studio records and trade press reports, Joanna Rapf explains the economic logic behind MGM’s pairing of Keaton with Jimmy Durante in three early talkies, and identifies a high point in their partnership despite the low critical regard in which the films are currently held. Rob King draws on a wide range of archival documents in a similar effort to explain the teaming of Keaton with Elsie Ames in the even more disparaged low-budget sound shorts for the Jules White unit at Columbia, examining these films within the context of Hollywood’s

WESTERN UNSETTLEMENT: Transcontinental journeys, comic plotting and Keaton's Go West

As signaled by its title, Buster Keatons Go West (1925) borrows as a template for its plot a familiar narrative of national migration and settlement, with the comic protagonist traversing a continent that in nineteenth‐century US culture was often figured as an ever receding ‘frontier’. Drawing on contemporaneous interviews, reviews and press book materials, this paper examines the ways in which Go West reworks elements of a westward migration narrative derived from popular histories and related genre forms. Made at a time when producer Joseph Schenck was touting Keatons capacity to produce dramatically unified feature‐length films, Go West synthesizes elements of physical comedy with a sentimental story, exposing qualities of estrangement and unsettlement at the tap root of both Western melodrama and urban slapstick. Through the crossing of genres, moreover, Go West reconfigures the cultural map of the western migration plot in ways appropriate to changing conceptions of national geography in the early twentieth century, from the perspective of the West Coast locale that Keaton now called home.

What's entertainment? Recent writing on the musical

Rick Altman, ed. Genre: The Musical. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 228 pp.

M. Hulôt in the archives

9.95 paper. Jane Feuer. The Hollywood Musical. Blooming‐ton, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1982. 131 pp.

THE RETURN OF JIMMY STEWART: The publicity photograph as text

7.95 paper. Clive Hirschhorn. The Hollywood Musical. New York: Crown, 1981. 456 pp.

From Failure: On Prepositions and History

17.95 cloth. Ted Sen nett. Hollywood Musicals. New York: Henry N. Abrams, Inc., 1981. 384 pp.

From Venice to the Valley: California Slapstick and the Keaton Comedy Short

50.00 cloth. Ethan Mordden. The Hollywood Musical. New York: St. Martins Press, 1981. 260 pp.

Cross-Talk: Language, Space, and the Burns and Allen Comedy Film Short

15.95 cloth.

Keaton in Shorts

8.95 paper.

Frank Capra : a guide to references and resources

Lucy Fischer, ed. Jacques Tati: A Guide to References and Resources. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1983. 160 pp.