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Buster Keaton's last great silent, made at MGM after he had signed away independence. A tintype photographer (Keaton) buys a newsreel camera to impress a secretary at MGM News and spends the rest of the picture learning, the hard way, what a camera is. The Yankee Stadium sequence (an empty ballpark that fills, in his mind, with a World Series) is a thesis about looking. The Tong War in Chinatown, shot as if the camera itself were a combatant, is the other. Edward Sedgwick directed; Keaton, as usual, designed the gags. Released 1928, it is the film in which the studio system both enabled and began to swallow him. The cameraman gets the girl and a job. The man who made it would not stay that lucky.
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The first MGM picture and the last that still feels like his. A tintype man buys a newsreel camera and learns what one is. The empty Yankee Stadium, a World Series played by nobody, is Keaton on looking. The Chinatown tong war is Keaton on getting the shot. After this the studio took the notebook.
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