The Great Buster: A Celebration

Bogdanovich's charming series of character sketches, Pieces of Time (1973), his monograph and film Directed by John Ford (1972), and his invaluable collection of interviews with Hollywood directors, Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors (1998), warrant prime shelf space in any Hollywood-minded library. In Nickelodeon (1976), a sentimental riff on the wildcat days of Edison-Era moviemaking loosely based on the exploits of his nonagenarian buddy Allan Dwan (first directorial credit, 1911; last directorial credit, 1961), he combined both vocations. Since his own glory days, Bogdanovich has appeared in countless filmcentric archival documentaries as an eloquent raconteur and gifted mimic (his Hitchcock is dead-on). The act performed by The Three Keatons consisted of what today would be actionable as child abuse: whacking, battering, and tossing little Buster across the stage and sometimes into the audience, the agile child always landing on his feet (he earned his moniker when escape artist Harry Houdini saw the six-month-old plummet down a flight of stairs. Like Chaplin and Lloyd, his fellow members of the silent comedy trinity, when Keaton moved from shorts into feature films, he knew that to sustain six reels he needed more than a picaresque fusillade of sight gags, that he had to construct a sympathetic character who moved through a world that paid lip service to narrative structure and Newtonian physics.