Article: `Keaton': why this man isn't smiling

BUSTER KEATON

Cut to the Chase

By Marion Meade

HarperCollins, illustrated, 440 pp., $30

There are hundreds of hours of Buster Keaton on celluloid. From his classic silent films "The General" and "Sherlock, Jr.," through his television appearances on such variety shows as "Ed Sullivan" to the terrible beach movie "How to Stuff a Wild Bikini," Keaton's persona was always stone-faced. He never smiled. Never.

In "Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase," a keen-eyed biography with a sharp sense of history, author Marion Meade contends that Keaton's sour expression began long before Buster appeared in his first movie, Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle's "The Butcher House" in 1917.

At the age of ...

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