Buster Keaton's first feature-length film, The Saphead (1920), famously includes his last onscreen smile. While the film is not the best choice to acquaint a first-time viewer to Keaton's comedy, it represents an essential and pivotal point in his career and will be watched with great interest by any fan of his later work. Building on his earlier work supporting Fatty Arbuckle (they made 15 two-reel films together before Keaton's service in France during WWI and three more after the war), The Saphead foreshadows several plot points familiar in his later films. Keaton stars as Bertie Van Alstyne, ne'er do well son of the richest man in New York (Willaim H. Crane) whose "shortcomings, ambitions, misfortunes and final triumph" are intertwined with the film's complex narrative in which Bertie's conniving brother-in-law, an illegitimate child, and falling stock prices of the family mine are intertwined with Bertie's love for Agnes, his adopted sister (Beulah Booker). The film features the development of Keaton's deadpan style, his restrained performance a conscious choice that reflected his innovative interpretation of Bertie as a "person who does not properly connect with his surroundings, his failure to understand being paralleled by his failure to respond emotionally." Keaton's performance subverts the class structure and conservative ending of the source material, a novel and play called "The Henrietta" (and "The New Henrietta") that was originally intended to star Douglas Fairbanks on screen. The film also is noted for Keaton's extended slap-stick acrobatics at the New York Stock Exchange. [Above quotes taken from Peter Kramer's excellent essay "The Making of a Comic Star: Buster Keaton and The Saphead" (1995)].
