Stage Door Canteen Days

 
Orson Welles says during his taped dialogues with Peter Bogdanovich that he got to know Buster Keaton during the down and out period, the Stage Door Canteen days. I didn't know what that meant except I thought that maybe Buster Keaton had hit so low he was working as a janitor in a canteen for actors. Then I look on Wikipedia and it says that the Stage Door Canteen was a famous restaurant and nightclub in New York during WWII. It was run by the Broadway theatre community as their way of helping the war effort by providing food and entertainment for the American and Allied servicemen.

Is it not a pity that instead of eavesdropping on the conversations of such meteors, they make feature films instead: films about things like trains, cops and robbers, cowboys and indians, sometimes even about politicians, etc.. Orson Welles says he used to think that the movie was just a vehicle for star personalities, that is, before he himself became a film director. Keaton had made his first film two decades earlier. His stagnating career took off again around this time with renewed zest. Perhaps meeting Orson Welles, rekindled the necessary spirit of artistic rivalry. Who knows? One can always hope.

All the stars were there: Helen Hayes serving sandwiches, Lauren Bacall dancing with the GI's. It was quite a deal in those days that they even made a movie about it.

At a certain point, in this heady atmosphere created by the inversion where the soldiers were the heroes, the wunderkinds of American cinema shake hands. One magician meets another. One is more confident than the other yet the other is filled with some kind of enveloping poise that is imposing just in normal speech. Kind of friendly, approachable, the kind of guy who would stop and ask you questions finding you somehow equally engaging. Orson Welles remarks that Buster Keaton was certainly one of the most beautiful men in movies. When he says this I don't think he means 'purely physical' even though that is mostly what one perceives in movies, especially silent movies where the acting involves making exaggerated gestures. Not having the benefit of sound, the drama can only be portrayed through the action. To appear bad, one had to really screw up the face to look frightening, eyes always popping out, legs kicking with angelic smiles. These are what a spectacle was supposed to contain: people falling off horses, runaway trains whipped out of the frame, houses collapsing all around the completely unharmed and unaware Buster and things like that.

Perhaps out of laziness but given these two directors' shared disdain if not downright contempt towards the business side of things, it is a wonder how someone was convinced to pay out for a film like Citizen Kane, to actually get it made; for what is essentially an existentialist work. Of course in time, thank goodness, the film survived all that bad publicity. Originality is an interesting quality in art. It would be an understatement to say that both men diplay a deftness in their in their works making them as they do with their own voices but it is this personal quality in their work that leads you to the Universal. They were both very absorbed in honing their art - the visual, the moving moment.

I imagine Orson Welles and Buster Keaton sharing stories about the mechanics of moviemaking. They would disdain the movie bankers, the movie sales staff, critics and press people who just sit around discussing things that have nothing whatsoever to do with the trick of telling stories. The poetic and pragmatic worlds compounded into a single moving picture on a plain screen.
- Bevagna, 5 12 2016