This film is available either on DVD+R or as a direct download in MP4 format. Please make your selection above.
The Download option for this product is a .zip file containing the three episodes. You will need a utility to unzip it.
.A three-part series from Thames Television.Part 1: From Vaudeville to Movies (1895-1924)Part 2: Star Without a Studio (1924-1933)Part 3: A Genius Recognized (1934-1966)This Thames Television biopic from film historians David Gill and Kevin Brownlow is an example of solid, traditional-style documentary-making at its best. There could hardly be a better subject than Buster Keaton - a giant of the silent era, arguably a more important artist than Chaplin - and with someone who was captured so comprehensively on film throughout his life, there is an abundance of material to chose from, an editor's delight. We see Keaton go from the pale-faced jauntiness of his youth, to the lugubrious early middle age of alcoholism, with his dark-ringed sunken eyes, to the worn-out bald and wrinkled premature old age of his sixties (he died at just seventy). Made in 1987, A Hard Act to Follow has interviews with those who were close to Keaton, such as his widow Eleanor, actress Marion Mack and director Charles Lamont, plus an archive interview from the sixties with Keaton himself. It is therefore a valuable historical record, unrepeatable today.
