Buster Keaton

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Back Stage

Back Stage was Buster's 12th short with Roscoe Arbuckle. released over a year after Good Night, Nurse. (Buster spent almost a year in France after he was drafted.) It has a more developed plot than the earlier two reelers: the backstage hands (Fatty, Buster, and Al) at the theater ("opry house", per title card) put on a show when the featured acts walk out. This time around, Buster appears in drag rather than Fatty, playing a girl in their show.

Buster performs several wonderful bits. He appears to walk down and up a flight of stairs (2:15), but Fatty removes a plank to show he really does not. He bends over backwards imitating an eccentric dancer (Jack Coogan Sr., father of Jackie) and takes a nice fall when Fatty knocks his feet out from under him with a broom. As a girl in the stage show, he does a spectacular acrobatic series of butterfly kicks (10:00). And an iconic Keaton stunt makes its first appearance, later to reappear in One Week and most famously in Steamboat Bill Jr.: a stage flat depicting a building front falls toward ukulele-strumming Fatty after Buster kicks out its support, but Fatty stands untouched precisely where a window lands. Buster and Fatty milk the joke for more laughs when they try unsuccessfully to reerect the flat.

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