The Golden Age of Comedy
In 1914, during a shoot at Keystone, Chaplin was suddenly told to put on a comic costume. He improvised with whatever was in the wardrobe room: trousers too big, a coat too tight, oversized shoes, a cane, a bowler hat. The Tramp was born. There's a well-known story that the trousers came from Arbuckle, the coat from Avery, the shoes from Sterling — the Chaplin estate's own site states this was studio publicity, not fact. The more famous the anecdote, the more likely someone made it up.
The other story took longer to settle. Buster Keaton's The General (1926) is now called by many his greatest film. When it came out, it was a box-office failure. It cost $750,000 and made about $1 million worldwide. Critics were cold — one wrote that death on a battlefield was no subject for comedy. After the failure, out of a sense of duty to his backers, Keaton gave up his independence and signed a restrictive contract with a major studio. He later called it the worst mistake of his career. He was fired in 1933 and sank into drinking.
The reassessment came after the war. Opinion began to turn around 1949, and today the film sits near 18th among American films and 35th among world films in critics' polls. In 1963, Keaton said it was the film he was proudest of, out of everything he'd made. This map holds several stories that arrived late. This is one Keaton lived to receive.
The two of them shared a screen only once in their lives, in Limelight (1952). Chaplin hadn't written the role for Keaton. He offered it, the story goes, once he learned Keaton was struggling.