Buster Keaton's Go West

Go West is one of Keaton's most endearing films.  It is unique as the only picture in which the comedian deliberately aimed at pathos; and though it is totally unexpected in him and he never tried it again to the same degree, he brings it off without the least embarrassment or mawkishness.
--David Robinson,,Buster Keaton (Indiana University Press, 1969)

Go West was the first Buster Keaton film I ever saw, when it was presented in 1970 by Henri Langlois at the Metropolitan Museum in a tribute to the French Cinematheque, as something of a preview to an outpost of the Cinematheque Francais scheduled to be built in New York which, alas, never happened.   It is a lovely film and something of a parody of Chaplin, as Keaton falls for the charm of a cow and rescues it from slaughter.  When Keaton saves a train of cows from bandits the boss offers him whatever he wants.  He says "I want her," meaning not the boss's daughter but the cow, Brown Eyes, and they ride off in a motorcar together.

There are many wonderful gags in the film, including a battle with barrels on the train west; trains play an important part in a number of Keaton films and he usually battles machines to victory.  There are also scenes where Keaton is repeatedly late to the ranch's dinner, arriving just as the food is gone and the hands are leaving, until finally he arrives immediately at the dinner bell, eats rapidly and heartily and then leaves when everyone else arrives. As the cows stampede through Los Angeles, scaring people out of stores and barber shops and led by Keaton wearing a red devil suit, it becomes clear that most people do not want to know where their steak comes from.

I find Keaton a marvelous minimalist performer, expressing much more by not smiling than many do by facial contortions (in The General, 1926, Keaton expresses worry and concern with just an eye that shows through a hole in a tablecloth).   In Go West a cowboy says "smile when you say that" and the best Keaton can do is move his lips with his hands, just as Lilian Gish did in D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms in 1919.  Whether one finds Keaton funny or not is subjective, but he is beautiful to watch for what he does with his face and his body, sometimes an acrobat, sometimes a dancer.

It is interesting to speculate what Keaton might have done in the sound era, if he had not done himself in with his personal problems and his contract with M-G-M; Chaplin and Harold Lloyd warned him against giving up his independence.  I am not one of those who thinks Chaplin's sound films are inferior to his silent films and I think Limelight (1952) is one of Chaplin's greatest achievements; Buster Keaton's appearance in that film suggests the unfulfilled possibilities that sound might have offered him.  Daniel Moews says in his book Keaton (University of California Press, 1977) that in Keaton's films "perfection was instantly achieved and firmly held, but it was a static perfection.  It led nowhere."  Perhaps this is true, but we still have Keaton's wonderful work, which I saw in total at the Elgin Theatre in New York in the 70's, lovingly restored with the help of Raymond Rohauer.