Amazon.com video review:
Buster Keaton's feature debut as a director (he shared credit with
gagman and longtime collaborator Eddie Kline) spoofs, among other things,
D.W. Griffith's Intolerance with a look at the trials of true love
through the ages. Buster plays a hapless suitor in three different epochs:
a
bearskin-wearing, dinosaur-riding caveman in the Stone Age; a meek
centurion
with a ragtag chariot in ancient Rome; and a jazz age Romeo in Model T and
black tie. In each time period, he vies for the object of his affections
with
burly, barrel-chested Wallace Beery, matching Beery's brawn and underhanded
dirty tricks with sheer energy and ingenuity. The diminutive deadpan comic
is hilarious under a shaggy fright wig and cartoon club as a thoroughly
modern caveman, a dwarf among giants at the mercy of romantic Darwinism,
but
the more inventive sequences belong to the later ages. The rousing chariot
race of the Roman segment is topped by a gymnastic chase through dungeons
and throne rooms, and the modern section is capped by a mad flight from the
police while he rushes to rescue his girl. Three Ages lacks the
dramatic unity and sustained creativity of his later masterpieces, but the
inventive gas and clever crosscutting turns what could be three individual
shorts into an interactive live-action cartoon. Also included are "The
Goat," a frantic "mistaken identity" knockabout comedy, and "My Wife's
Relations," in which Buster finds himself accidentally married into a
family
of bullying Irish Catholics. --Sean Axmaker
Amazon.com video review:
Buster Keaton was arguably the cinema's first modernist, an old-fashioned romantic with a 20th-century mind behind a deadpan visage. His films
brim with some of the most breathtaking stunts and ingenious gags ever put on
film, all perfectly engineered to look effortless. And, as Kino's magnificent
11-disc box set The Art of Buster Keaton conclusively shows, they are
among the funniest ever made. Keaton warped gags until they left the plane of
reality in such shorts as The Playhouse (1921) and The Frozen
North (1922), and takes a logic-defying leap into the very nature of cinema
itself in his hilarious Sherlock Jr. (1924). He takes on the mechanical
world with Rube Golberg ingenuity in The Navigator (1924) and perfects
his match between man and massive machine in Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928),
which features the funniest hurricane scene ever put to film, and The
General (1927), one of the greatest comedies of all time.
In addition to the previously released 11 features and 19 shorts from the peak
of Keaton's career, this set boasts the exclusive Keaton Plus, a
collection of rarities and tributes. The greatest find is the long-lost ending
to Hard Luck (1921), now restored to complete the film's final inspired
gag. Other highlights include newly discovered scenes from Daydreams
(1922) and The Love Nest (1923), entertaining excerpts from Keaton's 1951
TV show Life with Buster Keaton (he's still got it!), and his rare
dramatic turn in the 1954 television play The Awakening. --Sean
Axmaker
