Bogdanovich’s cheery uncertainty befits a film with the subtitle of A Celebration. He’s in print-the-legend mode, evangelizing a greater truth, one beyond mere fact-checking. Despite some talking-head testimonials from Carl Reiner, Johnny Knoxville, Leonard Maltin
Big names don’t guarantee the occasional
Bogdanovich’s celebration has its darkness, of course. He gives over the film’s middle third to Keaton’s career in the sound era. Keaton had masterminded all aspects of his great ’20s movies, but at MGM, starting in 1928, Keaton found himself at the mercy of studio hacks with little respect for — or interest in — slapstick or the inventive construction of gags. Divorce, drinking
Always a showman, Bogdanovich shrewdly, brazenly upends the usual life-passing-by structure of such docs to close with what we want most, a lengthy appreciation of Keaton’s feature-length mid-1920s work. Bogdanovich selects his highlights judiciously, gushes over them warmly and perhaps inevitably manages to work in an appearance from his old pal Orson Welles, introducing The General. Who could have guessed, back in the 1970s, that in 2018 we’d see a new Welles picture costarring Bogdanovich (The Other Side of the Wind) and a new Bogdanovich film with a Welles cameo? Running just over 90 minutes, The Great Buster ends on a high and will likely leave you wanting more. Isn’t it time for some epic PBS miniseries about the great silent film comics? Possibly one more rigorous than this celebration, one where we actually want to hear the talking-head experts talk?