The Cameraman (1928)

Such a frustrating disappointment

Beautiful, moving film.

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

1928 was a year of considerable change for film comedian Buster Keaton in more ways than one. His masterpiece "The General," hadn't been as successful at the box office as he was hoping. Keaton and his business partner went their separate ways. Buster Keaton was recommended to "M.G.M" and had no idea why the studio were interested in employing him. Regardless, he signed a contract with Louis B. Mayer and the next five years would prove to be a rather turbulent period in Keaton's life. The beginning of this period began very brightly with Keaton's final masterpiece, "The Cameraman." The story is quite a straightforward one which is a good thing in my opinion. Buster has ambitions in becoming a professional cameraman for an established New York newspaper. He is on the receiving end of derision by various people but that doesn't deter our affable hero. The leading lady of the film is the one who truly believes in Buster and is there to spur him on in achieving his ambition. There are many fine comic moments and set pieces in "The Cameraman." One of my favourites is when Buster and his date try to board a New York bus. As there is no room for any more passengers, Buster attempts to sit on the outside of the vehicle. He slips and lands hard on the concrete road. There was no camera trickery involved for this rather daring slapstick, you actually see Buster falling and landing on the road. How he didn't sustain serious injuries, I shall never know. Full credit to him for having the nerve to execute such slapstick. I enjoyed the scene where Buster imagines he is part of a baseball team at Yankee stadium. I'm surprised the comedian could cope with making a film in such a densely populated place like New York, seeing as he was nervous of large crowds. "The Cameraman" was also the last time Buster got to work with his usual gag writers, camera people, directors and other staff. They would be all be assigned to different people across "M.G.M."

Rollicking silent-era comedy from Buster Keaton.Simple yet engaging plot. However, its not the main story that matters, but the many detours on the journey. The whole thing is one random, funny adventure.Some moments of pure genius from Keaton. The dime bank scene was one, and the whole swimming pool scene was another.Great work from Keaton in front of the camera. Good support from Marceline Day. However, the show is almost stolen towards the end by Josephine, the monkey...

I'll get to The Cameraman in a sec, just bear with me. Did you watch Lost? I hope, for your sake, that the answer is no. I mean, c'mon – J.J. Abrams, I'm going to kick your ass in a dark alley if I ever get the chance, just for wasting my time. But I digress. I merely mention this to point out the character of Desmond Hume, who wags around the one Dickens novel, Our Mutual Friend, that he's saving. 'Cause see, I do that too. As a matter of fact, I'm sitting on Martin Chuzzlewit by Dickens, Pic by Jack Kerouac, and one lone piece from Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel. Please don't tell me how tragic and regrettable this will be if I get hit by a bus… I know, I know.All of this is to say that recently, I went to a screening of The Cameraman (1928) starring the one and only Buster Keaton. And this was the one and only Buster Keaton film I've never seen. So before you gasp and clutch your chest and say, "But Pretty Clever Film Gal, how could you neglect to see a Buster Keaton movie!?!" I refer you to my opening salvo above. Buster Keaton movies are rare and precious commodities. It's not like we're getting any new ones, unless somebody decides to use his powers for good not evil (I'm looking at you, James Cameron.) However, when you have the opportunity to see a Buster Keaton movie in a theater with music accompaniment from William O'Meara, well preciousness has to be put aside.The Cameraman-poster-Buster KeatonEric Veillette, impresario of Silent Sundays at the Revue Cinema and Silent Toronto perpetrator, introduced The Cameraman as Keaton's last great film, which is a fair assessment. Careful readers may have noticed that I did not refer to the movie as "Buster Keaton's The Cameraman," but merely stated that it starred Keaton. Though Keaton was an auteur before there was such a thing, writing, directing, editing, I suspect even catering all of his features up 'til this point, The Cameraman was directed by Edward Sedgwick. Notably, this movie was Keaton's first under his brand spankin' new contract with MGM. Things would go from bad to worse for Keaton and MGM, and in a little less than a year, creative control of his films would be wrested out of his hands. Keaton later called the move to MGM "The worst mistake of my career." Considering what followed, he's exactly right.But that's later. In 1928, The Cameraman has Keaton's fingerprints all over it. Sedgwick may have held the title of director, but no body puts Buster in the corner apparently, or at least not yet. As a filmmaker, Keaton is all about control – having it, losing it, regaining it. His films are precise, always demonstrating that's there's nothing coincidental about a good gag. Comedy is a presentation, dependent on timing and control and Keaton's work reflects this, always. So despite being stripped of the titular role of director, it's impossible to assert with a straight face that The Cameraman, perhaps one of his most self-reflexive works, was not firmly in Keaton's control.The Cameraman-Buster KeatonThe movie abounds with gags the define Keaton's preoccupation with control, or lack thereof. When he pawns his tintype machine to buy an outdated, hand cranked movie camera, all in the service of getting closer to Sally, the newsreel production office receptionist, things spin out of Buster's control pretty damn fast. His initial salvo in newsreel shooting results in a tragic mess of double exposed images – a battleship sailing down a Manhattan street, most notably. Forget the mechanics even – Buster struggles with the physicality of the machine itself, breaking the glass in the office door multiple times. In the end, the star cameraman of The Cameraman is a monkey, for pete's sake. Which might be a metaphor for Keaton's entire career: an aimless amateurism produces iffy experimental results, and an unrestrained primitivism produces a heroic quality results (not to mention funny results). Take that, MGM studio stooges! I think there's another point worth making about Buster Keaton and The Cameraman. Turns out, Buster is a fine actor. His previous, auteur-like body of work demonstrates beyond a doubt that Buster is fantastic performer, honed from basically being born on a vaudeville stage. He always had the timing, the exploitation and confounding of expectation to provoke a reaction, but did Buster ever act, did he build a character and flesh out a role? Perhaps freed from the rigors of being the writer-director-caterer, Buster is free to be our hapless little cameraman, so complete that when Sally rejects him, it will bring a tear to your eye. That's not the typical response to your typical slapstick and reflects the elevation of Buster's small-man-in-a-big-world character beyond mere comedy prop.With hindsight being 20/20, it's difficult to not find a tinge of the bittersweet in The Cameraman, solely because it is Buster Keaton's last great film. It is, sadly, mostly downhill for Buster from there. But, for all that, The Cameraman is not to be missed.

'The Cameraman (1928)' should mark a sad occasion in the career of comedian Buster Keaton. Until then, he had created such classics as 'Sherlock Jr. (1924)' and 'The General (1927)' through his own independent production company. In 1928, however, he accepted a berth at M-G-M, and most of his creative control was taken away from him; he became a studio stooge. But this film must be an exception to that rule, because it has Keaton's footprint all over it, and is one of his finest works.Keaton plays a lowly tintype photographer who vows to become a MGM newsreel cameraman, in order to impress a pretty girl (Marceline Day). His efforts at capturing riveting news footage at first prove fruitless, as he hitches a ride aboard a firetruck that is returning back to base, and then arrives at Yankee Stadium while the team is playing in St. Louis. However, when a full-blown gang war breaks out in Chinatown, Buster is there with camera cranking (and, no joke, a monkey with a machine gun!)Keaton is well-known for his death-defying stunts, and there are a few of them here, but the film really shines in the quieter moments, as the lovelorn cameraman must accept failure at every turn: there's one unforgettable image of Keaton sitting on the beach, having been abandoned by his girl, looking completely and utterly dejected, a broken man.Despite being thought lost for decades, 'The Cameraman' has proved surprisingly influential. A crowded dressing-room farce, in which two men attempt to undress in a confined space, was likely the inspiration for a similar (and even more chaotic) scene in the Marx brothers comedy 'A Night at the Opera (1935).' Likewise, that "Mr Bean" episode where Rowan Atkinson loses his bathers in the swimming pool is a direct homage to a scene here. And Keaton humorously satirises a scene in Frank Borzage's melodrama 'Seventh Heaven (1927),' in which the characters trample up seven storeys of staircases, their movements followed by an elevator crane.