The Cameraman

Buster, who shoots street portraits, falls for a girl who works at a newsreel agency and decides to become a newsreel cameraman to be near her. He has an old camera, no idea what he is doing, and his first footage is entirely unusable. Then he lands in the middle of a gang fight in Chinatown. The subject is not love but the persistence of a man who does not know his job. Keaton's comedy always comes from the same place: using the wrong instrument with the right stubbornness. The changing-room sequence at the swimming pool and the baseball game played alone are among the most cited passages in silent cinema. The form is Keaton's usual method: the stunts are real, the falls are real, and the camera stays wide so you can see there is no trick. This was Keaton's first film at MGM. The studio would not give him the creative control he had previously held, and he later called the deal the worst mistake of his career. It is one of the few good films made at the beginning of that decline. The original negative was lost; the film was long known from incomplete prints and was restored from a copy found later. MGM screened it for its comedy writers as a model for years. Marceline Day plays the girl and Harold Goodwin his rival. Edward Sedgwick directs. Who it is for: viewers who like silent comedy and physical stunt work. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a pristine copy; picture quality dips in places in the available versions and some passages are missing.