Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline | The Play House / 1921

the narcissi

by Douglas Messerli

 

Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline (screenwriters and directors) The Play House / 1921

 

I have to admit, alas, that over all the great Buster Keaton’s 1921 silent two-reeler, The Play House is basically a bore of sight gags and well-timed tumbles with its longest segment devoted to the impossibly comic situation of a team of mostly freshly hired Zoaves (the French, mostly volunteer light infantry regiments who fought, primarily in Algeria, from 1830 to 1962) who clumsily perform marching and strongman acrobatic acts. Theater scenery goes falling at regular intervals as Keaton performs, in remarkable makeup, as a monkey whose acrobatic feats are something to be admired, but whose human equivalent does entirely succeed in entertaining. And the first sequence is centered around a minstrel show that fortunately never gets underway sufficiently to actually demonstrate its racist subtext.

     The real motif in the film, of far more interest that any of its sketches, is the “double,” as I’ve repeatedly argued, a common theme in queer cinema. Keaton and co-director and writer Edward F. Cline don’t actually explore the deeper implications of their subject, but they do superficially play with the issue in a way that is often fun and, perhaps more importantly in the history of film, cinematically complex through his use of amazing camera tricks, which he readily revealed to his cinema-making peers.

       In the first portion of the film Keaton presents a theatre of a surreal and hallucinatory version of the Narcissus, as all the orchestra performers, minstrel players, dancers, and audience members from dowager old women to a nasty sucker-sucking kid are performed by Keaton himself, partially in mockery of film director Thomas Ince who often appeared in several roles in his own movies. As a theater-box viewer Keaton turns to the image of himself playing his wife to comment, after perusing the program, “This fellow Keaton seems to be the whole show."

      Keaton plays at least three of his roles in drag, but he is just as funny performing as the enthusiastic, back-itching conductor, the bass, clarinet, and trombone players, and the drummer. As a duo of dancers Keaton is totally in sync with his other. And the entire row of banjo strumming jokesters, some in blackface makes for a lovely vision of the 8 performers and the one interlocuter, given that in 1921 Keaton was certainly one of the most handsome actors in the business.

     Later in discussion with film critic Kevin Brownlow, Keaton recalled that he attributed the direction to Cline primarily because he did not want to be seen as being too much like Ince: “Having kidded things like that, I hesitated to put my own name on as a director and writer.”

      According to sources such as Eleanor Keaton’s book Buster Keaton Remembered and Rudi Blesh in Keaton, the camera lens required a matte box attached to its front, which had nine precisely-machined metal strips that could be moved vertically independently of one another. The cinematographer Elgin Lessley first shot the far-left Keatons with shutter up, leaving the others down. Rewinding the film, he opened the second segment of shutters and re-filmed Keaton, repeating the action seven times. Since the camera had to be hand-wound, it required a steady hand from Lessley in order to avoid any variation of speed. Keaton apparently synchronized his dancing performances of the music to a banjo player with the help of a metronome.

        If one might have wished that Keaton played all the roles for the rest of the movie, the director felt, as I suspected, that eventually the joke would end as his audience grew bored of the device. As it is, Keaton awakens in bed having experienced the awful dream we have just witnessed, only to find out that the bed itself is on stage, and that Keaton works as a theater assistant, extending the role of doubling to onstage/offstage, and soon after, when he is told to go out and hire more Zoaves, outside/inside. The act of twin sisters (both played by Virginia Fox) continues the doubling motif, the unknowing Keaton giving them separate dressing rooms, only to find what appears the same girl going into one and coming out the other. Later, his confusion is quadrupled as the twins both appear in mirrors. 

       Keaton falls in love with one of them, while the other clearly can’t abide him, making for further confusion as the stage assistant keeps kissing and even attempts to marry the wrong twin.

      Even his performance as a chimpanzee hints at the mirroring images of man and his nearest ancestor: is the man really a chimp, or the chimp a small, bent over man like Keaton himself? It’s too bad Keaton couldn’t take these important issues into deeper territory. But his, like most houses of mirrors, is created as a kind of funhouse not to be used as it was later by Orson Welles, as a house of horrors and murder.

 

Los Angeles, February 21, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).