The more of them you watch, the more difficult it becomes to think of them as possessing Imagination: silence is a symptom of their magical condition.

That bewildering joke, which suggests that Buster can only speak after laboriously readying his body, plays on the strange fate of silent film stars in our Like in all his best films, the sleepwalking smoothness of his physical antics combines with a preternatural sense of how film itself can be the subject of witty subversions and knowing mischief. This impish revision of an old routine about a hatful of black molasses, with Wynn taking the role originally played by Buster’s old pal (and Hollywood outcast) Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle will exaggerate the formal habits of silent film-intertitles and melodramatic expressions-to levels of inspired lunacy. He isn’t out of shape: a subsequent re-enactment of “the first scene he ever did for a camera” will prove he’s freakishly limber for a fifty-four-year-old and his timing’s still pin-sharp. Television is probably more accommodating to such outbursts of staccato weirdness than any other medium, but Buster’s act is much more than just an odd trick.

Wynn is astonished! His owlish eyes go wide, and Buster falls, exhausted, into his arms as the audience chuckles. Then, at last, he says “Hello!” in an eager innocent’s yelp. He spritzes something into his mouth, the host looks quizzically on, and what shy laughter there was in the audience has receded like a weak breeze. There’s a mysterious procedure of cheek massage and jaw agitation in which he looks like a gargoyle attempting to reverse the effects of amphetamines. He shrugs his shoulders a few times, bends his knees to ensure that he’s suitably limber, then performs some exaggerated respirations that make his chest swell and deflate like a ragged bellows. Carefully, the voice must be readied-the whole body is involved. (Shortly before his death, he would appear as the solitary figure in Beckett’s metaphysically queasy 1965 short, Film). Would you say something? Go ahead,” WynnĬajoles him, “speak!” And upon these ventriloquist’s orders, Buster commences a routine that looks like a ludic premonition of the anguished choreographiesįound in Samuel Beckett’s plays. “The American public would like to hear you say something. He ignores all conversational prompts, playing dumb and nodding a littleĪs if out of beat with the situation, mid-daydream.

Here he is, a little man in his trademark outfit of porkpie hat and rumpled suit. Wynn tells the audience that they are about to have “the great privilege in seeing for the first time,Ĭertainly on television, and alive, almost!”-an odd thing to say, don’t you think?-“one of the greatest of the great comedians of the silent moving-picture The set from the audience are fuzzy, gray, and monstrously thick, looking like nothing so much as a carefully graded spectrum of various sorts of domesticĭust the studio has the acoustics of a damp attic. Nicknamed “Miss Ice Glacier,” who sang “Bird in a Gilded Cage,” and blubbery Ed’s attempt to dance a ballet overture. The other treats on the show have included a special guest appearance from the famously deadpan actress Virginia O’Brien, His speech has an avuncular warmth, tumbling with a ringmaster’s glee through his Wynn, who would later voice the Mad Hatter inĭisney’s adaptation of Alice In Wonderland (1951), is a jolly host: he looks like a horned owl in a clown costume, plump and bespectacled with a rubberyĮxcitement to his expressions that suggests he’s already half-cartoon. To a segment in an episode of his eponymous comedy show, broadcast live in primetime on 9 December 1949. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have really something of great interest to the public!” The former vaudevillian Ed Wynn is providing the introductory patter

Buster keaton movies ice