Pre-Order The Buster Keaton Collection: Volume 1 (Blu-ray) Available for Preorder (1 Viewer)

[Ronald Epstein]

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[titch]

I just saw Peter Bogdanovich's The Great Buster - it's inferior to the 150 minute three-part biography made for UK TV in 1987 by David Gill and Kevin Brownlow (not available in HD). OK - I fully appreciate a 100 minute film isn't going to be as in-depth as a 150 minute series, but watching it feels like being subjected to a Reader's Digest version of Keaton's life and career, made for people suffering from attention-deficit disorder. The rushed structure with various talking heads is inane, and leaping from Keaton's career beginning to his career end, before showing the classic masterpieces for the last 45 minutes is a calculated ploy to manufacture a happy ending - the TV series had genuine pathos. For some strange reason, classical music is superimposed on most of the film clips, instead of the classic Carl Davis scores - what the hell is Ride Of The Valkyries doing being played over a scene from The General?! There are almost no archival interviews or footage of Keaton or his family, which were an integral part of the TV series, apart from a brief clip from This is Your Life and a bit from the Canadian Railways advertisement (which were on the TV series). Interspersing classic clips from Keaton's films with clips from Spider Man, Jackass and Spaceballs is horribly jarring.

But the high definition clips from the classic Keaton feature masterpieces, restored by Cohen, and shown on The Great Buster are fabulous, and comprise the last 45 minutes of the film. If you have the Masters Of Cinema set, you will already be familiar with the quality of the restored The General, Steamboat Bill Jr. and Sherlock Jr.. However, the picture quality of additional clips from Our Hospitality, The Navigator, Seven Chances, Go West, Battling Butler are equally impressive. Only College and Three Ages look a bit rougher. I really hope Cohen will release all of them on blu-ray.

 

[bigshot]

Ride of the Valkyries is often used in Birth of a Nation. Maybe it's a Civil War thing.