Buster Keaton in “The Three Ages”

Today is the anniversary of the release date of Buster Keaton’s first feature length film (1923).

Keaton cleverly designed it as a parody of D.W. Griffith’s, which had told four stories from as many historical time periods, highlighting the similarities between human struggles across the centuries. In Keaton plays a “young man in love” in prehistoric times, during the Roman Empire, and the present day (1923). Keaton was hedging his bets in this manner; if the feature didn’t sell he could always break it up into three shorts and sell those. The heavy in all three sections was Wallace Beery, and the love interest a young lady named Margaret Leahy, who’d become a film actress by winning a contest. (This was her only film.)

To learn more about comedy film history, including great Buster Keaton films like “The Three Ages” please check out my book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube