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RD-DD1843 [2017-02-08 06:49:24 +0000 UTC]

Silent Comic Genius - "The General", "Steamboat Bill Jr.", "Sherlock Jr.", "Go West", "Battling Butler", "College", "Seven Chances", "The Three Ages", "Our Hospitality", "One Week", "Balloonatics",  He also was a sound film actor, most notably in "In the Good Old Summertime" (with Judy Garland and Van Johnson) where he manages to destroy what everyone thinks is Mr. Oberkugel's (S.Z. Sakall's) "Stradavarius" violin in a pratfall.  Frequently he'd appear on television in the 1950s, and was in an episode (mostly silent, by the way) about a 19th Century Janitor with a time machine, who finds the 1950s too noisy.  He also was frequently a guest assistant to Allan Funt on "Candid Camera" (one choice joke was he sneezing so hard when putting pepper on his soup that his hairpiece falls off!).  Keaton was one of the three friends of "Norma Desmond" in "Sunset Boulevard" (with Anna Q. Nilsen and H.B. Warner) who William Holden nicknames "the Waxworks".  But his final moment of cinematic greatness was in 1951, when he shared the last highlight of the film "Limelight" with it's producer and director, Charlie Chaplin, in the only sequence the two titans of the 1920s ever shared together - a comic musical duet number.  This film still seems to be Keaton returning to his fascination with trains, here as the conductor on the Union Pacific train in 1956's "Around the World in Eighty Days" with David Niven, Shirley MacLaine, Canteflas, and Robert Newton. 

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