Next we come to the bronchial buster, or the man (it is usually a man) who, being in the throes of a terrific throat and tube trou...ble chooses that night for theater-going.... He will soon learn to pick his pauses with finesse. It does no good to cough while there is a great deal of noise going on on the stage. No one can hear. The time is just as the star is about to do a little low speaking to her dying lover or when the hero, alone in his garret, goes silently over to the fireplace and tears up the letter. There for a good rousing bark, my hearty, followed by a series of short sharp ones like those of a coxswain! If possible the appearance of apoplexy should be simulated.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Listen, Buster you and your quick-change acts aren't going to hang orange blossoms all over me just because you feel the cold weat...her coming on. No thank you. I'll go back where I can be honest without getting kicked around for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Look, Buster. Don't you get over-stimulated with me. I'm the little gal that flew all the way from New York to this lousy place, t...his dark continent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is difficult to compare Chaplin's and Keaton's gifts. Chaplin's fertile period lasted 38 years (some say even longer); Keaton's... lasted about ten. Chaplin's art depended upon a minute perfection and precision; Keaton's relied on speed and a tumult of imaginative, farfetched ideas. Although Chaplin the director was more an intellect than Keaton the director, Charlie the character was less an intellect than Buster the character. Although women were important metaphorically in Chaplin's films, sexual attraction and masculine virility were far more dominant in Keaton's pictures. The Chaplin films were smaller--centering on small facial gestures and objects; the Keaton films were larger--centering on human figures against a vast physical environment and huge, complicated objects. The Chaplin films moved slowly and quietly; the Keaton films with great pace and vigor. And yet Charlie was the character who laughed, smiled, and cried, whereas Buster was the one who rarely moved a facial muscle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Much has already been written of the uncanny ways in which Chaplin and Keaton seem to divide so much of the world, so precisely, b...etween them. Charlie the sentimentalist and Buster the ironist, the dancer and the acrobat, the critic of capitalist society and the deviser of happy-ending Edens outside of society--all these distinctions are well-known and important. But the most richly creative difference between these geniuses is in their language--not the language in their films (how wonderful it is that they are forever silent) but the language that their films make real. For Chaplin the space of the world is always and insidiously dangerous, perhaps even murderous. For Keaton, that same space is, breathtakingly, his toy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have one other pond just like this, White Pond, in Nine Acre Corner, about two and a half miles westerly; but, though I am acqu...ainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this centre, I do not know a third of this pure and well-like character. Successive nations perchance have drank at, admired, and fathomed it, and passed away, and still its water is green and pellucid as ever. Not an intermitting spring! Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was already in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied with mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had commenced to rise and fall, and had clarified its waters and colored them of the hue they now wear, and obtained a patent of Heaven to be the only Walden Pond in the world and distiller of celestial dews. Who knows in how many unremembered nations' literatures this has been the Castalian Fountain? or what nymphs presided over it in the Golden Age? It is a gem of the first water which Concord wears in her coronet. Yet perchance the first who came to this well have left some trace of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect encircling the pond, even where a thick wood has just been cut down on the shore, a narrow shelf-like path in the steep hillside, alternately rising and falling, approaching and receding from the water's edge, as old probably as the race of man here, worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from time to time unwittingly trodden by the present occupants of the land.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »