The Cameraman (1928)
Directed by: Buster
Keaton & Edward Sedgwick.
Written by: Clyde
Bruckman & Lew Lipton & Richard Schayer & Joseph Farnham & Al
Boasberg & Byron Morgan.
Starring: Buster
Keaton (Buster), Marceline Day (Sally), Harold Goodwin (Stagg), Sidney Bracey (Éditor),
Harry Gribbon (Cop), Edward Brophy (Man in Bath-House).
The
Cameraman was the first film Keaton made after signing that dreaded contract
with MGM – the one he would later call the worst decision of his career. It’s
also the only one he made for MGM in which he retained creative control – and
even that was pretty much by default. MGM didn’t want Keaton directing anymore
– just acting – and they made him work with a script in all but two sequences,
where often Keaton would improvise his gags on set. The studio hired Edward
Sedgwick to direct The Cameraman, but it became apparent quickly that he
couldn’t get what was needed – and Keaton took over from there. The Cameraman
is often seen as Keaton’s last stand – his last great movie – and even if I think
his follow-up (and only other feature he directed, at least partly for MGM),
Spite Marriage is underrated; it is hard to argue with that. The Cameraman is a
great movie – even if you can tell while you’re watching it that something is
just slightly different than Keaton’s other films. It’s just a little neater
and tidier than his others – a little more polished, with a little more
emphasis on the romantic subplot. You wonder if Keaton spends the last act of
the film with a monkey because studio execs thought people like monkeys
(they’re right by the way). Somehow though, Keaton makes it all work. The
Cameraman is simply a joy to behold.
Keaton
stars, as he often did, playing a guy just trying to make an honest buck –
taking Tintypes for 10 cents a pop on the streets of New York. It’s while doing
this that he meets Sally (Marceline Day) – and immediately falls for her. She
works in the MGM Newsreel office – and he wants to impress her, so he decides
to become a newsreel cameraman instead. He buys a cheap camera, and heads out
into the streets to try and take footage of anything – and of course screws up.
But Sally is sympathetic to him – he’s sweet, he’s rather lovable, so she
agrees to go out “walking” with him one day. The movie climaxes with not one but
two action sequences – the first where Keaton (now with a monkey assistant –
don’t ask) films a gang war in Chinatown, and the next at the yacht club during
a race, where Keaton makes a daring rescue.
The
plot, as it always is in a Keaton film, is rather simple. That’s not why we
watch a Keaton movie anyway – we watch it for the gags – and The Cameraman is
filled with wonderful comic set pieces. One of the only two segments where
Keaton was allowed to improvise has him head to Yankee stadium – where he finds
himself alone on the field, and pantomimes first him pitching and field, and
finally stepping up to the plate and hitting an inside the park homerun. Keaton
was a big baseball fan, and the entire sequence is wonderfully performed and
shot – I loved him running the bases in a single take, with the slight move of
the camera. The date sequence provides lots of opportunity for Keaton to
embarrass himself in front of Sally, and still try to maintain his dignity. The
best moment has him and a rather large man (Edward Brophy) both inside a narrow
changing room trying to get ready to go swimming – which of course ends with
them switching swimsuits.
The
highlights are, of course, at the climax – especially the extended gang war, in
which Keaton doesn’t just film, but at times becomes an active participant – I
loved the way he hands a knife back to a fighting gang member so he can keep
filming – subtly manipulating the news for a greater story. It is one of the
most elaborately staged set pieces in all of Keaton’s work – and he pulls it
off wonderfully. The speedboat sequence at the end is not quite as thrilling –
but it comes close. It also ends with what may just be the most heartbreaking
and sentimental shot in all of Keaton’s work – with him alone at the beach.
A
couple of things stood out to me as different about The Cameraman than much of
Keaton’s work. Often, even in his best movies, the “girl” he’s after is treated
as little more than an afterthought – someone Keaton has to impress in order to
win over. There are some exceptions – Kathryn McGuire in Sherlock Jr. proves
herself a more capable detective than Keaton, and McGuire (again) in The
Navigator is given a more fully rounded character to play – as unlike the rest
of the women in Keaton’s movies, we see her slowly fall in love with love with
him, rather than that love being treated as a given. I’m not sure Marceline Day
is quite given that much to do in The Cameraman – but it’s certainly a little
more complex than most of the roles for women in Keaton’s films – or at least
has more screen time. Other than Keaton falling in love with a cow in Go West,
it’s also the most sentimental of the love stories in Keaton’s films. It
doesn’t approach Chaplin levels of sentimentality, but it’s as close as Keaton would
come in his career. The other thing is the monkey. In movies today, adding a
monkey is usually a desperate attempt to increase the humor in a lame comedy –
and I doubt things were much different in 1928. The difference here is that
Keaton makes the monkey work. This is one of the greatest monkey performances
in the history of the movies – especially the scene where the monkey regains consciousness
(Keaton thinks he has killed the poor animal) – where the monkey holds his head
in a way that make me believe he really was coming to after blacking out. The
rest of the movie, the monkey provides even more frantic energy during the gang
war sequence. In short, the monkey is brilliant in the movie. When you add in
the performance of Brown Eyes in Go West, and that dog in the short The
Scarecrow, it really makes you see that Keaton was a genius at directing
animals.
The
film does have a more polished sheen than most of Keaton’s work – which had a
more chaotic spirit. This undoubtedly was because the studio made Keaton work
from a script. The studio even insisted that the last shot in the movie
contained Keaton smiling (the horror!) until test audiences hated it so much,
they allowed him to use a more typical Stone Faced Keaton shot. The studio
interference helped in some ways though – by making him use a script, The
Cameraman becomes one of Keaton’s more focused efforts, and doesn’t suffer like
some of his films from drifting from one set piece to the next with no plan.
MGM loved the film so much that according to the trivia section on IMDB, they
say they made their directors watch it for years after to see a perfectly
constructed comedy.
The
Cameraman is pretty much perfectly constructed – and should have been the
template MGM used for years to come with Keaton – make him do things a little
bit more by the book than he was used to, but basically let him do what he
wanted. Sadly, they didn’t do that, and it wasn’t long before they shoehorned
him into some talkies – that while popular and profitable, made Keaton miserable,
which contributed to his alcoholism, and his contract being terminated in the
early 1930s. The Cameraman in many ways was the last hurrah for Keaton. But it
was a great one.
