Customer Reviews

Three Ages

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

For years, public domain copies of The Three Ages have relied on a far from complete, contrasty 16mm print suffering from a lot of neglect and nitrate decomposition. The nicest thing about this DVD is Kino's greatest gift to the cinemaphile--you actually can see the movie. The pairing of Keaton with Beery is ingenious -- they even keep their own names in the "Modern Story."

Three Ages is often referred to as a parody of Griffith's Intolerance. However, a gap of seven years between the release of the two films makes this interpretation not as straightforward as it might at first appear. Moreover, Intolerance was something of a financial failure and it is far easier to parody a recent commercial success. There are similarities between the two films, but these should not be overemphasized, for whereas Griffith's film tells four very different stories, what distinguishes Keaton's film is that it tells three stories which in essence are the same. Keaton makes his point regarding the similar problems facing lovers through the ages by having them face the same recurring situations. The three stories resemble each other so closely that much of the humour of the film lies in the comparison between them. Thus Three Ages is not merely three short films spliced together. It is a far better and more unified film than that.

Many people seem to consider that Keaton was somehow merely practicing for his later triumphs when he made Three Ages. Granted it does not reach the heights of The General, but it should not be considered as some sort of minor piece of juvenilia. Keaton may not yet have been at his very best, but he could still make a film with many extremely funny and inventive moments.

Three Ages remains a highly enjoyable film, but it must be admitted that the print used for the DVD is quite poor. After watching near perfect prints on the other Keaton DVDs which Kino have released, one is left with a sense of regret that Three Ages did not survive in better condition. Still perhaps we are fortunate to be able to see the film at all. Keaton, at one point, told an interviewer that he thought the film was lost entirely.

Of the two short films included on the DVD The Goat is the best. Quite why it is called The Goat I'm not sure, but it is very funny and includes some hair-raising stunts which even Harold Lloyd might have balked at performing. It is said that My Wife's Relations reflects Keaton's relationship with his real wife's family, but this is to read back into the film problems which arose later than 1922. Keaton, at this point, was still happy with his wife Natalie Talmadge as is shown by her being given a starring role in the following year's Our Hospitality. My Wife's Relations should not then be viewed as autobiography, but rather as a fairly good comic farce. It has some fine scenes, but lacks the subtlety of Keaton's best films, for the supporting characters are really a series of grotesques.

Keaton's Three Ages is one of his lesser works, but it shows the same attention to detail that would be so praised in his best-known work, The General. Keaton's comedy is so matter-of-fact that whenever he does a gag, it appears to make perfect sense to the viewer. If his Roman character is in a chariot race, and one of the dogs is lame, then of course he will stop, examine the dog, take a spare dog from a box on the back of the chariot, and exchange them!

My Wife's Relations does indeed reflect the tensions occurring in Keaton's married life at that time. He married Natalie Talmadge because she wanted to get married, and Buster seemed a likely prospect (I am quoting from various Keaton biographies here). The fact that he cast Natalie as the leading lady in Our Hospitality does not mean that they were getting along, but that he wanted to placate her. Keaton, who lived uneasily with his wife's relations, made the film as a way of complaining about his in-laws without actually voicing his complaints. The film is a bitingly funny one.

The Goat (in other words, scapegoat) is yet another fantastically funny short in which Keaton is a victim of fate. His sense of comedy was far beyond that of Chaplin or Lloyd, which is why it stands up so well today.

THE THREE AGES is Buster Keaton's parody of D.W. Griffith's INTOLERANCE. Buster and Wallace Beery star as romantic rivals for the hand of pretty Margaret Leahy. The twist is that the story is told thrice by intercutting between three time periods: prehistoric, Ancient Rome, and Modern Times (1920's). The gags are fast and furious and many are truly surreal; highlights include caveman Buster attempting to woo Amazonian Blanche Payson, a Roman chariot race hindered by snow(!), and a beautifully constructed chase sequence with Buster escaping from a police station and inadvertantly returning there a few minutes later. The Kino source print has apparently been pieced together from the best available materials and with a few minor exceptions is sharp and clear. It also has a nicely done music score conducted by Robert Israel. As a sidenote, many filmographies list Oliver Hardy in the cast. The actor in question is in fact a near-Hardy lookalike named Kewpie Morgan.

THE THREE AGES (1923): "The Three Ages" is the telling of 3 love stories, set at 3 different periods in history: Stone Age, Roman, and Present (1920's). All 3 stories have the same plot: innocent Buster is competing for a girl who's also being wooed by a flashy rival, played by Wallace Beery in a pre-fame role. "The Three Ages" is Buster's debut as a feature-length movie star. Because it was his first try at the big reels, he decided to tell 3 stories, so that if he was displeased with the outcome, he could release the 3 stories as 2-reel shorts, the best of which, I think, is the 1920's-period sequence. "The Three Ages" worked out for him and was a hit when it was released, but I would not rank it as high as the classic features he made in the future, such as "The General" and "Steamboat Bill, Jr.". Still, it's fun to watch, and has clever gags.

THE GOAT (1921): Out of 35 Buster 2-reelers I've seen, "The Goat" is my personal favorite. One reason is because Buster intentionally made himself look like a moron by opening "The Goat" with a clever gag of himself getting into a long bread line that happens to end in front of a male clothing store, outside of which stand 2 mannequins that look like they're in the line, and which he gets behind and thinks are real guys. We see the line progressing towards the bread-receiving window, but Buster stays stationary because, of course, the mannequins are immobile. "The Goat" also includes the famous "bullseye" scene of Buster sitting on the nose of a train that's speeding directly towards the camera and stops just short of inches from it. "The Goat" contains some great street shots of Los Angeles in 1921. In the far distance, you can see some slow horse and wagon transportation eerily driving by, evidence that even in the early 1920's, the U.S. hadn't fully made the transition to 100% automobile. On the night I found out I wasn't getting promoted at my workplace, I decided it was either the neck of a whiskey bottle or "The Goat" that I was going to reach for. I chose "The Goat".

MY WIFE'S RELATIONS (1922): Charging him with a citizen's arrest, an old battleaxe brings Buster before a judge - a polish-only speaking judge - who thinks they want to get married. The judge performs the ceremony in a language the 2 don't understand, and they idiotically say "yes" to everything he asks them. Buster goes home to the shanty where his bride lives with her dad and loser brothers, and they start brow-beating him right away. Ho-hum...Buster makes the best of a bad situation. When the family erroneously finds out that he's coming into an inheritance, they kiss his you-know-what, until the end of this 2-reeler, when they find out he hasn't got a dime, and go back to beating him up again. "My Wife's Relations" is thought by Buster scholars to have been based on his real-life domestic situation, involving his wife Natalie's famous actress sisters and their overbearing mother.

Whether you're new to the work of Buster Keaton or exploring ways to complete your Keaton library you can't go wrong with this set. It contains his first feature length film as a director (Three Ages) and two shorts films, The Goat and My Wife's Relations. The editors of this set selected a good blend of Keaton themes and approaches to story-telling here. The Goat is the earliest of the set but is in some ways it is the perfect distillation of his character: a drifter, a victim of fate, machine and human will who somehow avoids disaster and even, surprisingly, wins the girl. Buster becomes falsely identified as an escaped criminal, chased continuously by cops, eventually exploiting his predicament by flashing the newspaper containing his mug shot to folks who want to give him a hard time. The climax is a great chase scene involving an elevator and set of stairs as Buster tries to rendezvous with his beloved who happens to be the daughter of the cop who has been pursuing him for most of the film! This film is simply unmatched as a spontaneous sequence of creative visual comedy.

My Wife's Relations (1922) is less satisfying because it strays from the best Keaton formula and degrades into a more purely slapstick genre. It is much more suggestive of the kind of film Buster did with Fatty Arbuckle 3 or 4 years previously; funny, creative, but more primitive and less satisfying to the modern viewer. It contains elements that are untypical of Keaton's character, such as physical violence towards a woman (not that the bully character of Keaton's wife did not deserve such abuse here!)

Finally, Three Ages is pure joyful visual comedy. It is a comic parody of Grittith's Intolerance, where the same theme is explored over three different historical periods. Here is the theme is love (boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy defeats rival and wins girl back) and the three ages are pre-historic, roman and modern (1920s); there are unlimited comic opportunities being explored here, as love and life are compared and contrasted. The energetic, optimistic mood is somewhat uncharacteristic of Keaton's films and more suggestive of Harold Lloyd, as Keaton's character overcomes bully obstacles with almost super-human skill and dexterity. In fact, the football game sequence looks forward to Lloyd's The Freshman, and the rescue of the girl from the polygamist predates Lloyd's Girl Shy. (Both Keaton and Lloyd were approaching their peek creatively during this period, and it's obvious that they played off each other's creative skills.)

By all means, buy this volume, whether alone or as part of the complete set.

THREE AGES is Buster's first feature where he has creative control. This is three shorts within a feature. Many great moments in each of the "Three Ages". I love the race scene with the dogs. In my view, The Three Ages is just a notch below his greatest movies, which is to say it is still a classic. This tape also includes two shorts: The Goat and My Wife's Relations.

THE GOAT IS BUSTER'S BEST SHORT and maybe the funniest short EVER made. Buster is mistaken for a killer "Dead Eye Dan". Big Joe Roberts plays the heavy.

Well, The Goat is also one of Keaton's 4 or 5 best shorts-- a great Kafkaesque setup in which Keaton's picture is accidentally used for an escaped criminal and he can't figure out why everyone runs from him in terror.

Buster Keaton (1895-1966) was one of the great silent comics, particularly known for his amazing pratfalls and deadpan expression. In 1920 Keaton starred in the feature-length film THE SAPHEAD, but Keaton was ambitious and wanted the same degree of control enjoyed by Charlie Chaplin. On his next feature film he would star, write, produce, and direct. The resulting film was 1923'S THREE AGES.

In theory, THREE AGES is a spoof on Griffith's legendary INTOLERANCE, a film that intercuts several stories from different historical eras, and it is true that Keaton's THREE AGES does much the same. The first story is set in the stone age, the second in ancient Rome, the third in modern America, and all three work together to make a cohesive statement. But Keaton's motives may have had less to do with INTOLERANCE than with the box office. Although he was still an unknown quantity in feature films, his short movies were very popular, and if THREE AGES failed the three stories could be re-edited and re-released independently. It didn't happen: THREE AGES was a success just as it was, and Keaton would go to much more ambitious, elaborate, and memorable works in the future.

The conceit is a clever one. In each story Margaret Leahy plays a beauty who is pursued by love-lorn Buster Keaton and ruffian Wallace Beery--and Leahy's parents, Joe Roberts and Lillian Lawrence, prefer Beery. The result are a series of chases and battles that are astonishingly clever. Keaton rides a dinosaur, is dragged by a mammoth, and engages in a prehistoric rock-throwing battle; finds himself in a Ben-Hur-like chariot race and a lion's den in ancient Rome; and runs riot on the football field in modern America--all to win his lady love. The picture is fairly good, the music is pleasant and inventive, and although I wouldn't put THREE AGES on the same page with Keaton's SHERLOCK JR. or THE GENERAL, it is still a lot of fun to watch.

The DVD includes two Keaton shorts as well: the 1921 THE GOAT and the 1922 MY WIFE'S RELATIONS. In the first, Keaton is mistaken for a dangerous prison escapee; in the second he is accidentally married to brutish woman with a brutish family. Both are charming, but of the two THE GOAT is the more enjoyable, a non-stop chase that is funny as only Keaton can make it. Again, the picture is good and the music pleasant, and both--especially THE GOAT--are worth a watch. Recommended to silent fans.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer
In Memory of friend Jerry Williams

I'd have to rate this as slightly above-average Keaton fare. It shows Buster trying to romance the girl away from Wallace Beery, and what would have transpired if the story had taken place in (1) the Stone Age; (2) The Roman Age, and (3) The Modern Age.

I liked them in that order, too, with more laughs with the older periods of time, although I laughed the hardest at a couple of segments in the Roman Age. My favorite was the chariot race held in the sand. That had a number of clever things. The brief bit with the lion was funny, too, sort of a parody of the Biblical story of Daniel in the lion's den.

They were smart only going five minutes or so with each age and then going back with the story each time. Each "age" had four or five segments in total.

Nothing hilarious but definitely worth your time if you are checking out silent film comedies