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Acknowledgements
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(Joseph Frank Keaton VI 1895–1966). American actor, director, and writer.
Appeared in short films that he co-wrote and co-directed
with Edward F. Cline: The Haunted House (1921); The Electric House
(1922).
Appeared in short films: The Chemist (Al Christie
1936); Mixed Magic (Raymond Kane and Keaton 1936); The Spook Speaks
(Jules White 1940); The Triumph of Lester Snapwell (James Calhoun 1963);
Film (short) (Alan Schneider 1965).
Appeared in and directed, and produced and edited,
uncredited: Sherlock, Jr. (1923).
Unfortunately, if that critic happens to be compiling an
encyclopedia of science fiction film, his attention must be drawn
elsewhere—to the later part of Keaton's life, long after the man had effectively
destroyed his career by means of bad business decisions and heavy drinking; for
it is at that time, when the aging comedian needed to work, wanted to work, and
was necessarily taking whatever jobs were offered him, that one begins to
regularly observe Keaton in films of "genre interest," even if they are rarely
interesting. Thus, one of the films he made in Mexico, originally entitled El
Moderno Barba Azul and later reissued on videocassette as Boom in the
Moon, might be celebrated as the first postwar film to depict an attempted
voyage to the Moon in a spaceship, were it not so unwatchably wretched. He
fared a little better on television with "The Awakening," an Orwellian take on
Nikolai Gogol's "The Overcoat" that has actually survived and is now available
on YouTube. However, an episode of The Twilight Zone especially crafted
for Keaton by Richard MATHESON,
"Once upon a Time," proved disappointing. Its excellent idea was to first film
Keaton in the style of silent films as a man in1890, disgruntled with the era's
high prices, who travels through time, hoping to find better deals in the
present, only to confront a normally filmed but oppressively expensive world,
driving him back to the past; yet the project never came to life, so this
slow-moving and unfunny episode rarely shows up in Twilight Zone
marathons. Keaton is more amusing in a similarly stylized instructional film
for Eastman Kodak, The Triumph of Lester Snapwell, and he was very well
used in Samuel Beckett's singular short, Film, as a man who is aware he
is being filmed and keeps trying to avoid the camera.
Most bizarrely, the elderly comedian was for some reason
embraced as a beloved mascot in one of the worst film series of the 1960s, the
"beach party" movies, where he sporadically appeared to execute a stunt or two
before the senseless, incoherent plot again shifted back to the antics of
dancing teenagers, forgettable songs, morons from outer space, and/or touches
of absurd magic. In the installment I most recently watched, Sergeant Dead
Head, Keaton attempts to get some laughs as a befuddled soldier serving at a
base for spaceships before he vanishes from the story without explanation,
achieving only the dubious triumph of being funnier than Frankie Avalon. But
Keaton was famous for enduring every humiliation with a stone face, even as he
surely recognized that his once-distinguished career was limping toward a most
inglorious conclusion.
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