Buster Keaton's Connection to Toronto
Great star's last acting job was in a construction safety film made here.
by Eric Viellette
Newspaper clipping promoting The General at Loew's.
In 1920, Keaton worked on a series of shorts at Paramount with Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. He was soon given his own production unit, releasing films like Sherlock Jr. and Three Ages. Although The General is now recognized as perhaps Keaton’s finest achievement, it was unpopular when it was released and proved a financial failure. As a result, Keaton, to his frustration, was assigned a production manager who oversaw expenses and reined him in on occasion.
Keaton soon went to MGM, the assembly-line of movie studios. As an independent auteur, he had been a one-man gag department; now he had a whole team creating gags for him and he lost creative control of his films. While still funny, films like Spite Marriage and Free and Easy lacked the spontaneity often seen in his earlier films.
In 1965, he made his final silent film, The Railrodder, for the NFB. He then came to Toronto for The Scribe, an industrial short for the Construction Safety Association of Ontario. Helming the project was John Sebert, noted photographer and author of The Nabes, a book about Toronto movie-houses, including The Revue. As a first-time director, Sebert was in awe of Keaton. Unlike the suits at MGM, he let the great Stone-Face loose: “You didn't direct Buster too much,” he said to Marion Meade in her biography of Keaton.
Although 70 years old at the time, Keaton still performed his own stunts, although they relied more on timing than physical strength.
Sebert was also shocked to see Keaton smoking multiple packs of cigarettes per day. “He always had a cigarette in his hand,” he told Meade. “Then he'd go into these coughing fits that lasted four or five minutes. The racking that poor guy went through was terrible.”
Keaton passed away in 1966, at a time when his films were being rediscovered by a new generation. But thanks to the efforts of film preservationists, The Revue audience can appreciate the genius of what Roger Ebert claims is “arguably, the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies.”