In the new DVD, Films of Buster Keaton / Music by Bill Frisell, jazz guitarist Bill Frisell offers his eclectic compositions on three of Keaton's films -- two early shorts from 1920, The High Sign and One Week, and the 1925 western comedy Go West.
The three selections represent two interesting phases of Keaton's career. The High Sign and One Week were the first two shorts directed by Keaton after he split with Fatty Arbuckle and started on his own. The High Sign was the first Keaton short but was held back a year before release because Keaton was unhappy with it. He shouldn't have been -- it is filled to the brim with a succession of sight gags that would become Keaton hallmarks. It also includes an amazingly-framed gag sequence concerning Keaton's attempt to shoot bottles from a badly-aimed gun that relies on camera placement for the jokes. It culminates in a wild sequence of Keaton racing through trapped doors in a house filmed entirely in cutaway as Keaton runs from one room to another like a rat in a maze. One Week was the second Keaton short produced but the first one released. It details Keaton and his bride trying to put together a do-it-yourself house. A disgruntled suitor changes the numbers on the parts of the house and Keaton ends up constructing a madhouse monstrosity that wouldn't be lost in the production design of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Go West is Buster Keaton in the character comic feature mode, and like all of Keaton's features it is pure Americana. Keaton goes west, but mockery of D.W. Griffith is clearly on his mind. He plays a Griffith-type character named Friendless who falls in love with another Griffith moniker named Brown Eyes -- only Brown Eyes is not a Lillian Gish character but a cow. Gish's presence is felt, however, in a poker scene in which Friendless complains about a fellow poker player's cheating. The cheater pulls a gun and says, 'Smile when you say that.' Keaton, his claim to fame being his eternally impassive countenance, finally ends up propping up the corners of his mouth with his fingers in a nod to Gish's attempt to smile at abusive Donald Crisp in Broken Blossoms.
Frisell, taking his cue from The Club Foot Orchestra's outré 1990s score for Keaton's Sherlock Jr., composes enervating jazz scores for the three Keaton films, and his alternate jazz stylings surprisingly do not destroy the spirit of the films (as the Club Foot Orchestra's screwy score does for Nosferatu) but, rather, enhances the viewing of them, giving the Keaton films a David Lynch-like edge that emphasizes their dreamlike textures. In particular, Frisell's score for Go West eschews the phony western ditties and opts for a singularly American blues rock that favors the movie more than the cornball western tunes clamped onto past incarnations of the film.
Frisell's scores are a triumph of music scoring that complements these silent wonders of 90 years ago and should once and for all signal, at least for Keaton's films, the demise of the old-fashioned piano and organ scores from the Gaylord Carter-Blackhawk Films era. One hopes that Frisell may carry on and re-imagine many more of the great Keaton classics.
