"It's a relaxed study of greatness, of exquisite physical comedy, of how'd-he-do-that stuntwork, of a vigorous cinema artist who saw new and enduring possibilities for his medium." - LA Times
“He had, says someone in Peter Bogdanovich’s documentary The Great Buster, “a face you could paint your feelings on.” The legendary silent-movie comedian Buster Keaton was known as “The Great Stone Face” for his trademark deadpan, but his expressive, just-keep-swimming eyes told endless stories.
“The Great Buster, a thoroughly entertaining film, takes us through Keaton’s history — a life that spanned the formative years of the film industry. Born Joseph Frank Keaton in 1895 to traveling vaudevillian parents, he learned physical comedy through time spent being flung around on stage as part of the Keaton family act.
“With a wealth of clips, the film takes us through Keaton’s screen career, which began in 1917 with comic short films made for Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, graduated to full-length features in the early 1920s, and essentially ended less than a decade later with the advent of talkies and cartoons. Though he continued to make short films, and brief appearances in features, until his death in 1966, his prime had ended. As Charles Chaplin said of the end of the silent-film era, ‘just when we got it right, it was over.’” - Seattle Times