Buster Keaton: Tempest In A Flat Hat by Edward McPherson - review by Patrick O'Connor

Patrick O'Connor

He Could Laugh at Everything

Buster Keaton: Tempest In A Flat Hat

By

Faber and Faber 288pp £20
 

IN 1965 BUSTER Keaton made a surprise appearance at the Venice Film Festival, where Film, a short movie he had made with Samuel Beckett, was being screened. The audience gave him a five-minute standing ovation. 'Sure, it's great,' he quipped, 'but it's all thirty years too late.'

Edward McPherson aims his new biography of Keaton at those who are just discovering him, a generation whose grandparents were born long after the heyday of the silent cinema. Modern viewers, armed with the DVD pause-bunon, can study the mechanics of films in a way that even film historians would

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter