Words of past images.

• Author: Gehring, Wes D.
• Position: REEL WORLD

I AM WRITING A BOOK on silent movie comedian Buster Keaton and the 12 feature films he made from 1923-29. The hook I am using is that no one has written about him keying almost entirely upon period material.

It is common knowledge Charlie Chaplin was the silent auteur. Besides starring as the iconic "Little Fellow" Tramp, Chaplin wrote, directed, scored, and produced his own pictures. Yet, how was the artist's work usually treated during this period? What follows is a typical quote from a 1924 Los Angeles Times article: "Lots of people can tell you what motion pictures will be like in a hundred years. Charles Chaplin can show you.... In Chaplin we have the actor who reached perfection without ever traveling along the road of imperfection."

Indeed, that same year, another iconic silent star, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., had written in a journal then known (another revelation) for its serious film criticism, The Ladies Home Journal. "If Chaplin had done nothing else in his pictures, 'A Woman of Paris' [1923, a sophisticated Chaplin drama in which he did not appear] has demonstrated that there is a subtler use of the screen then had before been attempted.... He has proved that everyday life ... can be made compelling." Thus, if possible, Chaplin's commemoration was even higher in the 1920s.

Robert E. Sherwood, meanwhile, is celebrated as a multi Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and biographer. However, upon diving into the period archives, a case can be made for calling him one of silent cinema's most-exceptional critics. For instance, today Keaton is considered Chaplin's only serious silent rival. Unlike the creator of the Tramp, the 1920s appreciably underrated Keaton. The period regarded him as an important, but lesser, "mechanical gag" comic along the lines of the then more popular and praised Harold Lloyd--the thrill comedian best known now as the figure hanging from a skyscraper clock in "Safety Last" (1923).

In contrast, while today's lionization of Chaplin's inspired poignancy that embraces the 19th-century sentimentality of a Charles Dickens remains, Keaton has been given a major upgrade. He now has a near-Chaplin status from a radically different perspective--being a pioneering theater of the absurd artist, a la Samuel Beckett. Yet, that brilliance blew by period critics, except for Sherwood. In a 1922 review for LIFE (a sophisticated humor magazine not to be confused with the later pictorial journal of the same name), Sherwood wrote...