By Steven Suskin
23 Oct 2011

	Cover art for "Buster Keaton: The Short Films Collection 1920-23"

This column has previously expressed appreciation of the art of innovative filmmaker Buster Keaton (1895-1966). Fans of the Great Stone Face — that stone face reportedly stemming from his early realization that he got more laughs that way — will be pleased to learn that Kino has brought us Buster Keaton: The Short Films Collection 1920-23 [Kino]. Keaton — who started performing in his parent's vaudeville act when he was three — moved into films in when he was second banana to Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. When Arbuckle was promoted from two-reel shorts to feature films in 1920, Keaton was contracted to write, direct and star in 20 23-minute shorts of his own.

They are all here, on three discs (DVD or Blu-ray). Nineteen, that is, which is all Keaton made. (Some are not quite complete, but it is only through a fluke that they have survived at all.) What we get is the chance to watch Keaton develop. From the first, he is brilliantly inventive, mixing stunts, oversized props and camera tricks. In the first of the films, "The High Sign," he needs a place to hang his hat so he paints a hook on the wall; later, rushing from a villain, he spies a landscape painting on the wall and leaps through it. In "The Play House," he goes to a vaudeville theatre where everybody is Buster, including the entire orchestra and some society-lady patrons. In "One Week," which was his first hit and almost instantly established him as one of Hollywood's top comedians, he builds a crazy house which literally spins on its foundations and comes to an ignominious but hysterical end. With "Cops," "The Electric House" and others, it was clear that Buster was ready for features.

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	Cover art for "The World of Sholom Aleichem"

The annals of early television contain all sorts of things you never thought you'd see and all sorts of things you never knew existed. Zero Mostel in a play based on the work of Sholom Aleichem? With Nancy Walker and Jack Gilford??? Yet here we have The World of Sholom Aleichem [E-One], from 1959, and it as almost as fascinating as it sounds. "The World of Sholom Aleichem" was a long-running Off-Broadway affair which opened in 1953, back in the days when the concept of Off-Broadway was just taking hold. I would call it a hit, but as I understand it this was a ragtag piece short on scenery and long on imagination, devised and developed in part to offer employment to blacklisted performers. Morris Carnovsky, Phoebe Brand, Jack Gilford, and Howard DeSilva (who also directed and produced) were among the participants; general manager Bernard Gersten and press rep Merle Debuskey went on to a long, tandem career at the New York Shakespeare Festival and Lincoln Center Theater. Two unlikely participants were stage manager Ossie Davis and his wife Ruby Dee, who played an angel.

Six years later, "The Play of the Week" — a quality anthology series that lasted less than two seasons — brought "The World of Sholom Aleichem" to television. Only Carnovsky and Gilford remained from the stage production; the big star added to the package, presumably to garner viewers, was Gertrude Berg (of "The Goldbergs"). Most important to the success of the program — and most interesting from the vantage point of today — is Zero Mostel. This was a year after he received an Obie Award for the Off-Broadway "Ulysses in Nighttown." As "The World of Sholom Aleichem" aired, Mostel started rehearsals for what was meant to be his grand Broadway comeback in the David Merrick/Garson Kanin "The Good Soup." Mostel was hit by a bus and severely injured, causing him to withdraw. A year later, though, he stormed Broadway with his Tony-winning turn in Rhinoceros."

"The World of Sholom Aleichem" consists of two one-acts and a third, brief playlet (adapted from a story not by Aleichem but by I.L. Peretz). Mostel stars in the first and appears in small — but impossible not to notice — roles in the others. The first is about a religious teacher in Chelm who is sent to buy a goat for milking; with Nancy Walker as the wife, he is extremely henpecked. Lee Grant, another blacklist victim, sells Zero the goat — which is a female goat but changes into a male goat and back and forth. The second piece stars Gilford — on leave from the Broadway run of Once Upon a Mattress — as "Bontche Schweig," a Job-like peasant. The third and meatiest is "The High School," starring Berg but stolen by Carnovsky in a seemingly-thankless role that turns galvanizing in the final scene.

Production quality is low, and the reproduction from the original videotape is less than optimal. But the chance to watch Mostel in "The World of Sholom Aleichem," five years before Fiddler on the Roof, is intriguing. There's no Tevye here, no daughters and no pogrom. Zero does have an abrasive wife who stands in for Golde (and who, in Walker's hands, is mighty tart); he does get to muse upon what life would be if he were a rich man; and — in a non-singing, non-dancing play — manages to get in enough singing and dancing to suggest what was to come.

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	Cover art for "The Dybbuk"

Also from E-One comes another episode of "Play of the Week," the 1960 production of The Dybbuk. This has a high pedigree, coming from Sidney Lumet, a Yiddish-theatre child actor who had graduated from television directing to the big screen in 1957 with the gripping "Twelve Angry Men." "The Dybbuk," from the 1914 Yiddish play by S. Ansky, tells of a girl who is gripped by an evil spirit; sort of an exorcist without the pea soup. Interest comes from the presence of two actors just then starring in Broadway musicals, Carol Lawrence (of West Side Story) and Theodore Bikel (of The Sound of Music). Also on hand are Michael Tolan, Ludwig Donath, and Gene Saks. Given the participation of Lumet, I expected to be swept away but I wasn't.

(Steven Suskin is author of the recently released Updated and Expanded Fourth Edition of "Show Tunes" as well as "The Sound of Broadway Music: A Book of Orchestrators and Orchestrations," "Second Act Trouble" and the "Opening Night on Broadway" books. He also pens Playbill.com's Book Shelf and On the Record columns. He can be reached at ssuskin@aol.com.)

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