The Great Buster: A Celebration Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		4.0

The Great Buster: A Celebration Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 29, 2019

While Peter Bogdanovich is of course remembered for some of his films like The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon and What's Up, Doc?, he’s probably just as well remembered for some of his film scholarship, including interviews with and/or books about such icons as Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock. Bogdanovich is a rather apt impersonator, and some of his ubiquitous talk show appearances have included sometimes hilarious “versions” of either Welles or Hitch, delivered with a kind of uncanny authenticity. Evidently Bogdanovich’s expertise extends to Buster Keaton as well, though considering the fact that much if not all of Keaton’s reputation is due to Keaton’s work during the silent era, any Bogdanovich impersonations may not have the same resonance. The Great Buster is an appealing overview of Keaton’s rather remarkable, if at times rather sad, career, and it offers Bogdanovich in “narrator” mode, helping to segue a structure that isn’t always strictly chronological. While fans of Keaton in particular or film history in general (The General?) will find a lot to admire in this documentary, it may be a passing comment by Cohen Films’ Charles Cohen in a supplement included on this Blu-ray as a bonus feature that may be the cause for the greatest celebration: Cohen mentions that he acquired all but one of Keaton’s silents several years ago, and has spent that time upgrading and restoring the films to “4K standards”. So, there may well be more Keaton in Cohen’s future, and it augurs well for those releases that it appears Cohen is willing to invest time to restore and upgrade them.

Bogdanovich proves to be an engaging “host” for this tour through one of the film world’s more storied lives, and for the most part he follows the tried and true principals of straight ahead chronological accounting and copious talking head interstitials. He has wisely assembled a rather loving group of people who either knew and worked with Buster personally, or Buster’s third wife Eleanor Norris. That lends a really sweet intimacy to several of the reminiscences. Those are probably offset at least partially by a few questionable entries, including what struck me anyway as a kind of patently odd assertion about Keaton’s influence on Spider-Man: Homecoming. Other homages to Keaton’s influence struck me as being a bit more relevant, including a brief but telling moment with Mel Brooks where he cites how Keaton’s films often drew attention to the fact that they were films was something he tried to emulate.

There’s an early snippet from an old episode of The Dick Cavett Show featuring Bogdanovich and Frank Capra, and Capra discusses how he thinks the “talkie” era simply ended the careers of “pantomime artists” (as Capra describes him) like Keaton. What the documentary actually makes clear, though, is that despite a number of setbacks, including what Keaton himself saw as a devastating decision to accept a big deal at Metro Goldwyn Mayer, a studio not exactly known for nurturing comic geniuses, Keaton did continue to work throughout the sound era. There are some frankly kind of sad moments scattered throughout this piece, though, including the well documented aspect of Keaton reduced to writing gags for other, arguably lesser talented, comedians during one especially dry spell. I frankly was kind of surprised by some passing information about Keaton suffering a pretty serious nervous breakdown and having to be institutionalized in a straitjacket, with several newspaper articles more or less “announcing” the end of his career.

The one place where Bogdanovich momentarily departs from a straight ahead accounting of Keaton's timeline is with regard to his now legendary output in the 1920s. Bogdanovich calmly informs any concerned viewer that the documentary will be returning to that decade later, which indeed it does, but it might have actually given The Great Buster: A Celebration even more emotional heft had Bogdanovich simply left it "in place", so to speak, since Keaton is yet another Hollywood heavyweight who grasped the brass ring rather forcefully, only to have it yanked even more forcefully from his clutch. Instead, Bogdanovich just largely skips over the decade to document what happened afterwards up through the 1960s, before going back to revisit some of the most iconic comedy films ever made.

The Great Buster: A Celebration does of course feature a glut of often fantastically funny Keaton bits from his great films, and it’s amazing to see what a brilliant physical comedian he was, especially considering the fact that he was so well known for having a basically immobile “stone face”. Keaton’s facility with pratfalls is documented as stemming from his earliest childhood, when he was more or less used as a prop (replete with a handle attached to his back) so that his vaudevillian mother and father could literally toss him around the stage. Perhaps it was that physical resilience that helped him, if only fitfully, to address some of the emotional hardships he encountered along the way.

My colleague Brian Orndorf wasn't quite as enamored of The Great Buster: A Celebration as I was. You can read Brian's thoughts here.

The Great Buster: A Celebration Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Great Buster: A Celebration is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Media Group with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer (intermittently) in 1.78:1. As can be seen in several of the screenshots accompanying this review, there are a number of snippets from various films that hover around Academy Ratio, and still photographs can be even more narrow. The contemporary interview segments (all in 1.78:1) all look nicely sharp and well detailed, and they almost always feature close-ups of faces, something that helps to elevate fine detail levels. The archival footage is rather widely variant in quality, with some clips from early Keaton works showing pretty significant damage in terms of lots of scratches and nicks, along with more serious issues like emulsion bubbling. Contrast and grain structure are also often widely variant in any number of these older offerings. Video culled from the television era can display slight anomalies like ghosting. All in all, anyone used to the variety of image quality regularly seen in retrospective documentaries like this one should be generally well pleased with the quality of this presentation.

Note: For those who are interested in such things, this is one of the first, if not the first, releases from Cohen that I can personally recall which comes with a slipcover.

The Great Buster: A Celebration Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Great Buster: A Celebration features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track which frankly some may deem unnecessary, given the fact that much of this piece is talking heads, and the silent material offers "only" musical accompaniment. Fidelity is fine throughout, and the music does occasionally open things up, but a stereo track probably would have sufficed perfectly well.

The Great Buster: A Celebration Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Conversations from the Quad with Peter Bogdanovich (1080p; 28:49) has some brief introductory comments from Charles Cohen (who as per above mentions getting the Keaton oeuvre that he owns to "4K standards", with Bogdanovich then making what appear to be introductory comments before a screening. Then there's a brief pause (which is where I assume the screening took place), followed by Richard Pena interviewing Bogdanovich. Sound is just a bit "phase-y" at times on this for some reason.


• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 1:50)

The Great Buster: A Celebration Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There are a number of brief but fascinating interviews in this piece, but I have to say for anyone who has laughed at that fake note to a supposed cleaning lady named Rosalina that Werner Herzog ostensibly wrote, there is an absolutely hilarious comment from the noted director at around the 30 minute mark that I won't spoil here other than to say it may well delight fans of dark sensibilities. That said, it's the sweet reminiscences from people who actually knew Keaton that really give this piece some honest emotion, and the selection of film clips is excellent as well. With an understanding that this utilizes a lot of archival footage that is often of pretty widely variant quality, technical merits are solid, and The Great Buster: A Celebration comes Highly recommended.