Silent movies don’t get a lot of attention these days, but they should. From bold artistic statements to groundbreaking special effects, silent movies laid the foundation for everything we enjoy in motion pictures today. Even martial arts maestro Jackie Chan credits silent film stars such as Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton with directly influencing his brand of intensely physical and often hilarious kung fu buffoonery in films such as “Legend of the Drunken Master” and “Twin Dragons.”

As for me, I’d take a Buster Keaton comedy over Charlie Chaplin any day! Also known as The Great Stone Face, Keaton was intensely physical, phenomenally witty and forever deadpan. Unlike the Three Stooges’ mean-spirited antics, Buster’s slapstick was usually self-deprecating or an act of survival. Despite a lack of dialogue and often grainy film footage, Keaton’s movies are just as hilarious and accessible today for modern viewers as they were for filmgoers of the 1920s.

“The General” is Keaton’s crowning cinematic achievement. It is the hilarious story of a humble little train engineer (Keaton) during the Civil War. All he really wants is to drive his train, which is named The General, and marry his sweetheart. But running a steam locomotive, winning his girl’s heart and trying not to be hijacked by warring armies provides tons of challenges for the always unassuming deadpan comic.

One important thing to keep in mind during this 1927 classic is simply that there were virtually no safety measures, wires or nets to protect the actors, including the star who performed all of his own stunts. When Keaton is seen walking all over the moving steam engine and riding all of its various parts at regular speeds, that really is Keaton. When parts of the train are blown up while steaming down the tracks, the actors and/or cameramen are really riding the exploding train. Stars and extras risked life and limb at a time when movie tickets ranged from only a dime to a quarter. Unlike today’s CGI wonders, everything you see on screen in “The General” is real. There was only so much trick photography and special effects could do at the time. The few trick scenes there are, are usually pretty obvious, though no less entertaining.

Performing with his vaudeville family since the age of 5, Buster learned very young that the audience always laughed much harder when he showed no expression during his father and mother’s slapstick routines. With that discovery, his father never let him smile on stage. Getting his big movie break with Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle at age 21 in 1917, Buster was already a veteran comedian adept and creating some of the most outlandish deadpan slapstick routines on stage. (Buster also had uncommonly good luck. In addition to being virtually indestructible in myriad rough-and-tumble acts, the day he started filming with Arbuckle he met his first wife and first put on and developed his trademark flat porkpie hat. That first movie “The Butcher Boy” even became a big hit.)

Despite his deadpan delivery, Buster’s rarely smiling face was very expressive. Perhaps the most iconic scene from the “The General” was one of forlorn heartache. Buster is sitting on the iron linking bar between two locomotive wheels wallowing in misery and the train slowly slips into gear. Buster rides the bar up and down oblivious to the outside world for several cycles of the motion before realizing the train is running away from (with) him. It is a moment where your heart reaches out to him, but at the same time you’re forced to laugh as even his moment of pain is comical.

In addition to playing a train engineer, Keaton was famous for engineering many elaborately impressive sight gags. His most famous was “the falling wall” scene in “Steamboat Bill Jr.” (1928). While standing in front of a house, it falls on him, but he is perfectly positioned to be where an open window keeps him from getting crushed. In movies such as “The Electric House,” Buster wires a whole home with tons of incredible and unrealistic devices to make one family’s life “easier.” Naturally, nothing works quite as it is intended, but Keaton really did rig a house to do that. As a teenager, Keaton famously devised a real alarm clock that triggered a series of events to wake up a sound-sleeping friend. The clock ultimately did everything from lifting half the bed and tossing out the sleeping friend to lighting the kitchen stove to make breakfast. It might seem like an impossible “Tom & Jerry” scene, but it was real life Buster Keaton in the early nineteen-teens. Keaton only had one day of formal schooling as a child (and was expelled for goofing off too much), but he was a natural tinkerer and engineer. When not on the stage or making a film, he was constantly tearing apart various machines and contraptions (including cars) to understand how they worked and even improve them or rig them for comic props. He said in his autobiography that if he couldn’t have been an actor, which was always his first choice, he’d have been a civil engineer. He then jokes that he was lucky to be successful as an actor because no college in its right mind would take anyone with one day of formal schooling.

Other great Keaton films include “Sherlock Jr.” (1924), “The Paleface” (1922), “The Cameraman” (1928), “Seven Chances” (1925) and “Our Hospitality“(1923). (The latter featured his father Joe, his wife Natalie Talmadge and his 1-year-old son Buster Jr.) I’ve seen four of his movies on the big screen with a live organ accompaniment, and they are still side-splittingly remarkable. Even DVDs fill in the music for the silent films, which are still a riot on your TV.

Despite troubles with alcohol, Buster survived the silent film era unlike many of his fellow stars of that time. He worked right up until his death at 70 in 1966. His talkies included appearances in hits such as “Sunset Boulevard” (1950), “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1966) and “Limelight“(1952) with Charlie Chaplin. He even had cameos in several Annette Funicello “Beach” and “Pajama” movies. He also acted in TV shows ranging from “The Twilight Zone” to “Route 66.”

Many of Keaton’s early films were saved from the deteriorating affects of old stock silver nitrate film in the 1950s. Preservationists then saw to making serviceable prints that we can now enjoy on DVD. If you’re in the mood to laugh but are looking for something completely different, I cannot more highly recommend exploring Buster Keaton’s work, especially “The General.”