KEATON THE MAGNIFICENT

By RICHARD CORLISS

Nothing is less funny these days than the state of movie comedy. The Hollywood farces dominating the world's screens are sad affairs populated by TV stars playing dumb. The notion of laughter as a worldwide language is dormant, presumed dead. So what's a viewer to do?

Watch Buster Keaton, in the 19 short films and 11 silent features he made between 1920 and 1928. Watch his beautiful, compact body as it pirouettes or pretzels in tortured permutations or, even more elegantly, stands in repose as everything goes crazy around it. Watch his mind as it contemplates a hostile universe whose violent whims Buster understands, withstands and, miraculously, tames. Watch his camera taking his picture (Keaton directed or supervised all his best films); it is as cool as the star it captured in its glass.

Keaton would have been 100 this week--he starred in his first film 75 years ago--but his work requires no scholar's indulgence for antique art. It is fresh and universally funny. Watch, laugh and marvel: this is movie comedy as it should be.

The good news is that for the first time since they were new, you can see Keaton's films without having to peer through the accumulated crud of illegal dupings. Among many centennial tributes, including Marion Meade's thorough, poignant new biography, Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase (HarperCollins), the best present is Kino Video's release of 10 cassettes that include all the great works, spiffily restored. amc, the cable movie network, will show the whole oeuvre on Oct. 4, Keaton's birthday.

Keaton is usually enshrined with Charles Chaplin and Harold Lloyd in silent comedy's holy trinity. In fact, his true film siblings are the old adventure stars Douglas Fairbanks and William S. Hart. Like Fairbanks, Keaton performed gorgeous, reckless stunts; his films were thrillers culminating in wild cyclones (Steamboat Bill, Jr.) and boat disasters (The Navigator). Like Hart, Keaton was the American loner: a dour, improbably heroic figure beneath a hostile sky.

He was famous for not smiling. In a lovely moment from Go West, a tough cowpoke orders him at gunpoint to smile; after considering whether he'd rather die, Keaton fingers the corners of his mouth into an awful grimace. But this blank visage was a versatile comic instrument. The giant eyes spoke all manner of emotions: ardor, terror, despair, sheer mulishness. The Keaton deadpan is stoic, heroic and as thoroughly modernist as a Beckett play or a Bauhaus facade. Next to him, Chaplin is a Victorian coquette, Lloyd a glad-handing politician.

Joseph Keaton Jr. was born to a knockabout vaudeville family and quickly put on the stage. The lad toured with his family until 1917, when he entered films as second banana to Fatty Arbuckle. In 1920, Keaton left Arbuckle to make his own movies. The medium was still in its infancy; comics were pioneering the craft of making people laugh at moving images. Keaton, it turns out, knew it all-intuitively. His body, honed by vaudeville pratfalls, was a splendid contraption. And as a director, Keaton was born fully mature. He was just 25 then, and as eager to mine the potential for film-flammery as he was to design the wondrous gizmos that make his movies one big notions shop. His ingenuity was utterly American; he had a tinkerer's obsession to learn how things work and how he could make them work to comic effect. This was Keaton's world: everything goes wrong; everything moves perfectly.

Everything, that is, but the girl. His shipmate in The Navigator seems inadvertently bent on drowning Buster every five minutes. And the Southern belle in The General nearly loses the Civil War three years early. Exasperated by her "helpfulness," he impulsively throttles her, then kisses her, then returns to the job at hand. Of all Keaton's females, only one stole his heart: the cow Brown Eyes in Go West.

Buster seemed so solitary, so oblivious to sentiment, that no one could touch him or catch him. The classic Keaton climax is of Buster walking blithely down a Los Angeles street while a herd of women, cops--cows, even--chases after him. And when he is caught, when Boy and Girl end up married, it's not necessarily a happy ending. In the coda to College we see the couple as newlyweds, then as young parents, then as bickering old folks, then as names on their tombstones. Sometimes THE END is the end.

For Keaton the end came abruptly, sadly, in the late '20s. His producer, who was also his brother-in-law, sold him out, literally, to MGM, and Keaton lost control of his films. It was a crash that led to pained obscurity--as second banana to Jimmy Durante, gag writer for Red Skelton, waxwork to Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd., cracked mirror image to Chaplin in the 1952 Limelight. Keaton died at 70 in 1966. He never got to savor the happy ending that film history had planned: the rediscovery and restoration of his films, the flabbergasted smiles of today's children gazing on the Great Stone Face, the influence his work has on movie comics--as both inspiration and reproach.

So watch and marvel. Watch any of the wonderful stunts: balancing on a three-man pyramid in Neighbors, say, or careering over collapsing bridges on the handlebars of a driverless motorcycle in Sherlock Jr. Watch, and see how beautifully the impossible can be made both visible and risible. The wonder is that the same person had the sharp mind to conceive these amazements and the supple body to perform them. When Buster Keaton got them all to work together--his mind, his body, his intelligent love for film--anything was possible.