The Great Stone Face—-Wasn’t

On All Hallow’s Eve, we quite naturally watched Buster Keaton’s 1921 two-reeler, The Haunted House.

And of course, there on camera, displayed in all his glory, was The Great Stone Face, as Keaton is known far and wide.

Yet I beg to differ. Oh, sure. In most of his film appearances, Buster didn’t smile. But he did a lot of other things with his face that were a beacon for his state of mind, whether frustration, yearning, fear, relief… you name it.

‘Hey,’ you might be thinking. ‘I’ve seen him smile all over the place! And it’s disturbing!’ And you’d be right.

Just about every 1917 Comique film Keaton did with Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle is a virtual smile-fest: from The Butcher Boy, Keaton’s screen debut, through Oh Doctor! (a personal fave), The Cook (ditto!), His Wedding Night, and Coney Island.

However, in these two-reelers, Buster’s not playing his own creation, his “little fellow… an honest working man,” but rather a character in someone else’s film.

In The Haunted House (produced by Joseph M. Schenk and distributed by Metro Pictures), Buster plays a somewhat inept bank teller. Big Joe Roberts is The ‘Stache-Twistin’ Villain and Virginia Fox, The Honest Bank President’s Daughter (for whom Buster quite naturally falls).

Somewhere along the way, the villains capture the banker’s daughter and drag her off to the titular Haunted House… which really isn’t, though nobody knows this but the villains, who ‘haunt’ it on purpose so they can get away with appropriating the bank’s money.

As in any Keaton two-reeler, the simplest situations work themselves into long chains of absurdities and laughs in which Buster clearly displays puzzlement, concern, frustration, and terror.

‘But how? Since his face is made of Stone?,’ you might be thinking. He doesn’t smile in his own films, true. But those enormous, liquid eyes, expressive brows, the set of his jaw, and his sheer physical genius work overtime.

A comely bank customer urges Buster to break the rules and allow her an early withdrawal. Watch him nearly swoon when her coy pleading brings her within an inch or two of his face.

In a scene reminiscent of The Butcher Boy, a pot of envelope glue gets loose and just about gets the better of him (and everyone else in the bank, including some holdup men), though he conquers the sticky situation at last with hot water and a hammer.

But wait! There’s more. The bad guys have set Buster up as Suspect Number One, and he flees, only to end up in that ‘haunted’ house, where skeletons, ghosts, headless men, revolving floors and sliding staircases keep him alternately somersaulting in fright and slumping in relief.

A bonus to the bad guys is that a troupe of actors, who have been presenting their version of Faust, are jeered offstage. They high-tail it from the theater, still in costume, and also take refuge in the Haunted House.

And when Buster runs, whether it’s from gunmen, ghosts or devils, every muscle in his body telegraphs terror, and those expressive brows and compressed lips help tell the tale.

Eventually Buster falls through the floor of the Haunted House and perishes. He finds himself ascending that Stairway To Heaven, only to be rejected at the Pearly Gates. A sliding staircase rockets him down to That Other Place (set design extensively borrowed for an episode of Futurama, when goofy protagonist Fry visits Lucifer’s living room to beg for a favor.)

Relax, Buster. It’s only a dream. He awakens from the nightmare, catches the villains, and wins the girl.

That face of Buster’s is one of cinema’s Most Recognized: stoic, strong and noble, with a profile for the ages.

But hardly made of stone.

As always, many thanks to Lea S. for hosting this Busterthon!

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