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In "The Playhouse" (1921), a tour de force of special effects unrivaled even to this day, Keaton played every part in a theater: the whole orchestra, the actors, all nine blackface minstrels, both halves of a dance act, and every single member of the audience, young and old, male and female. He was a generous collaborator, sharing directing credit with Eddie Cline on most of the shorts and three features, though Cline graciously conceded that Keaton was responsible for 90 percent of the comic inventions in their films (Dardis, 70). Working in the same atmosphere of experimentation and absolute artistic control that had characterized Arbuckle's operation, his team developed a sort of anarchic creative style, employing (in addition to houses) all manner of boats, herds of cattle, squads of police and armies of women, among other hostile devices, to imperil the Great Stone Face. Unlike Chaplin's warm comedies, Keaton's humor was cool and aloof, characterized by James Agee as "a freezing whisper not of pathos, but of melancholia. " His humorless hero, far from exercising the Tramp's self-pity, exhibited a serene capacity for absorbing frustration and withstanding disasters without ever cracking while seeking a measure of serenity in a world where peace is hard to find (Dardis, 47). Despite some delightful gags (i. e. , Keaton thrown to an affable lion, manicures its claws), "The Three Ages" did not represent a significant advance over the shorts, but "Our Hospitality" (also 1923), a beautiful period piece, revealed for the first time the artist's love for trains while clearly demonstrating how his work stood apart from the conventions of the period.
There was no speeded-up action, which he felt spoiled the timing of the gags, and none of the wild mugging that passed for comic acting of the day. He avoided studio sets, preferring natural locations, kept titles to a minimum and used close-ups sparingly, instead favoring the long-shot, especially as concrete proof that the stunts were real and not some cinematic hocus-pocus. He followed quickly with "Sherlock, Jr. " and "The Navigator" (both 1924), assuring his place in film history (Jeffery, 83). More than 60 years before Woody Allen would appropriate the gag by having a movie character step off the screen into life for "The Purple Rose of Cairo" (1985), "Sherlock, Jr. " involved a projectionist stepping into and out of the movies he shows upon the screen, becoming subject to the plastic worlds of space and time that Keaton so deftly manipulated in all of his films (Bengtson, 137).
A showcase of clever camerawork, "Sherlock Jr. " featured a famous montage sequence which switches him rapidly from a garden to a busy street, to a cliff-edge, to a jungle full of lions, and so on -- all without any apparent cuts in his own movements. Keaton remarked, "Every cameraman in the business went to see that picture more than once, trying to figure out how we did some of that. " The virtuoso stunts were no less masterful, and Keaton, who did all his own stunts in the film, managed to break his neck in one fall but continued working, discovering the fracture ten years later (Dardis, 74). For "The Navigator" (co-directed by future Oscar-winning actor Donald Crisp), he provided himself with the biggest prop he could lay his hands on (an ocean liner) and drew from his lifelong joy in creating appealingly crazy mechanical gadgetry. Though his next three films ("Seven Chances" and "Go West" both 1925, and "Battling Butler" 1926) were not up to the standards set by his first features, "Battling Butler" actually out-grossed "The Navigator", and "Seven Chances" boasted time-lapse photography of a puppy growing to become a huge dog, as well as a scene in which Keaton entered a car and promptly exited after the background dissolved to a new location, a bit of movie shorthand greatly appreciated by his audience (Dardis, 48).
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