The Cameraman

The Cameraman, a Buster Keaton movie made in 1928, is a classical example of a silent comedy.  The movie has a simple, lucid structure that can be readily expanded to incorporate gags and comical sequences without detracting from the principal emphasis of the plot.  Everything is exquisitely calculated, precisely designed, and not really very funny.  Like many of Keaton's comedies, the viewer is left in awe, astounded by the comedian's grace and athleticism and his razor-sharp timing, but, also, excluded as it were from much participation in the formulaic plot -- we know what will happen before it occurs, although, as in many silent comedies, the gags are frequently far more grandiose and astonishing that we could have predicted.  But the general shape of the narrative, resolutely without anything like satire or social criticism, is wholly predictable, a simple-minded, if emotionally, satisfying morality play in which the beleaguered hero in the end wins the affection of the girl notwithstanding his apparent incompetence.  Keaton plays a street photographer who sells cheap tintypes for ten cents an image.  He encounters a beautiful girl who works at MGM in the documentary department -- the film seems to be taking place in New York City and appears to have been shot on location.  Documentary film maker are imagined to be brave and bold pioneers -- we see one of them filming a battle in World War One in the midst of huge explosions and machine gun fire.  Keaton takes the girl's picture, falls in love with her, and tries to impress her by becoming a documentary fiml maker himself.  His initial efforts are complete failures and he can't go in or out of the door of the MGM offices without shattering the window with his tripod -- it's an ongoing gag that's not funny at all, but rather demonstrative of the hero's radical ineptitude. The girl gives Keaton a tip that there is a Tong War about to begin in Chinatown.  He finds himself in the middle of spectacular street fighting in which the rival gangs shoot at one another with Tommy guns and big heavy WWI vintage machine guns.  (Before reaching the scene of the battle, he has acquired a fantastically expressive and well-trained capuchin monkey -- one of the jokes in the film is that the monkey is far more expressive than Keaton.)  Keaton's footage of the Tong War seems to be lost; he thinks he forgot to lead his camera.  He is fired.  His girlfriend goes for a boat ride with the hero's rival, a dapper bruiser who is literally twice Keaton's size, in a sandy harbor that looks like somewhere near LA.  There is an accident and Keaton rescues the girl.  The big bruiser boyfriend takes credit for saving the heroine and Keaton is left sitting alone and disconsolate in the rubbish on the ugly looking beach.  Fortunately, the capuchin monkey has filmed Keaton's rescue of the heroine, the lost Tong war footage is found, and Keaton is vindicated, winning the girl in the end.  As he walks down Fifth Avenue, ticker tape descends on him and it seems as if the whole city is celebrating his victory.  But a quick inserted shot shows us Lucky Lindbergh riding in a open convertible and, it appears, that Keaton with his lady love is simply walking in Lindbergh's triumphant procession.  The movie contains some fantastically beautiful shots -- a scene in which Keaton staggers through the rain with the camera moving ahead of him seems to anticipate half of the glories of Italian neo-realist film and the Tong War is excitingly portrayed.  (As one might expect, there is a strong whiff of racism about this sequence -- at one point, Keaton violates all journalistic ethics by restoring to one of the combatants a dagger so that the man can fight, and die, more spectacularly for his camera.  We would have a different feeling about this scenes, I think, if it were not stereotyped Chinese battling in the streets.)  Generally, films that feature monkeys alongside their lead man are in desperate straits -- in this case, the diminutive monkey, lithe and strong as Keaton himself, is a good match for the hero and the little beast is endearingly cute.  Comedies of this sort are very interesting in that they were set in the present-day of the 1920's and, inadvertently, depict with great, even startling, clarity what day-to-day life was like at that time.  Keaton's small furnished apartment gives us a glimpse of how people lived in the cities in the late twenties and there is a fascinating scene at something called "the Municipal Plunge," actually a public swimming pool.  As is often the case in silent films and two-reelers made in the thirties, some of the gags are protracted to nightmarish and Kafkaesque effect -- in this picture, Keaton shares a tiny changing booth with a huge man and they keep getting entangled in one another's clothing:  the effect is palpably stifling and claustrophobic.  It is isn't funny but it is certainly disturbing.