Buster Keaton’s Most Dangerous Films

Before stunt doubles, safety regulations, and CGI were commonplace in Hollywood, actors risked life and limb to pull off movie stunts. During the silent film era, the most elaborate and dangerous stunts were performed by famed actor, comedian, and director Buster Keaton.

Born into a vaudeville family in Piqua, Kansas in 1895, Keaton began performing with his parents at age three, and soon became well acquainted with risky stunts. As part of a comedy routine, he had a suitcase handle fitted to his costume so his father could easily pick him up and throw him around, sometimes into the audience or the orchestra pit.

Despite accusations of child abuse, Keaton never suffered any injuries, and was billed as “The Little Boy Who Can’t Be Damaged.” He enjoyed the stunt so much that he’d laugh as he flew through the air. When he realized the audience would laugh more if he didn’t laugh himself, he learned to maintain the deadpan expression he would later become known for as a film star, even earning the nickname “The Great Stone Face.”

As an adult, Keaton told an interviewer that he learned early on how to perform trick falls. “The secret is in landing limp and breaking the fall with a foot or a hand… I started so young that landing right is second nature with me.”

Filmmaker Orson Welles called Buster Keaton “the greatest of all the clowns in the history of the cinema” and “a supreme artist.” Film critic Roger Ebert once proclaimed, “The greatest of the silent clowns is Buster Keaton… Harold Lloyd made us laugh as much, Charlie Chaplin moved us more deeply, but no one had more courage than Buster.”

1. Three Ages (1923)

Three Ages (1923) was the first film Keaton ever wrote, produced, directed, and starred in. According to some sources, he structured it as a series of three episodic shorts so that, if the film was a box-office failure, it could easily be cut and re-released as separate films.

The three episodes take place in different time periods: the Stone Age, Ancient Rome, and the Roaring Twenties. In all three, Keaton, as the protagonist, competes with the villain, played by Wallace Beery, for the affections of the same woman, played by Margaret Leahy.

In the Roaring Twenties portion of the film, Keaton performed a stunt in which he leapt from a wooden board balanced on one building’s rooftop to another building’s rooftop. Though the buildings were actually constructed sets, they towered over 35 feet high and were too far apart for him to make the jump. He fell short and smashed into a brick wall, then fell into a safety net off-screen. His injuries left him incapacitated for three days.

However, when Keaton later watched the footage of his fall, he decided to incorporate it into the film. He added to the scene by filming himself falling through three awnings, then grabbing hold of a drain pipe, which breaks and catapults him into a fire station. He slides down the fire pole and finds himself hitching a ride on a fire truck.

Three Ages was a commercial success upon release, though Keaton himself was said to be dissatisfied with the final product. Some critics and audiences considered it a parody of the film Intolerance (1916), which was also made up of self-contained episodes taking place in different time periods. Keaton never confirmed or denied this was the intention.

2. Our Hospitality (1923)

Keaton directed and starred in Our Hospitality (1923), a comedy film that satirizes the famous feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys, which ran from 1863 to 1891. Keaton played Willie McKay, a young man who, having grown up in New York, returns to his birthplace in the Appalachian Mountains and gets caught up in a decades-long familial rivalry with the neighboring Canfield family.

Keaton’s then-wife, Natalie Talmadge, played Willie’s forbidden love interest, Virginia Canfield, who invites him to her home for dinner with no knowledge of the feud between their families. Her brothers and father vow to kill Willie, setting off a high-speed chase with slapstick humor and daring acrobatic feats.

The stunts in this film include Keaton falling off a horse, climbing a mountain with unstable cliffs, and having a rope tied around his waist and getting the rope caught in the wheels of a train, resulting in Keaton getting dragged along. Keaton later rides two small traincars that come unattached while he has one leg on each. The cars go off the rails, throwing Keaton into a river.

For the river scene, Keaton was attached to an underwater restraining cable, but the cable broke during filming. Keaton was swept downriver and crashed into several rocks until he grabbed an overhanging tree branch. He managed to hang on long enough for the crew to rescue him.

Footage of this incident remained in the film. Keaton went on to finish the scene, which ended with him dangling by a rope over a massive waterfall. Though the waterfall was merely a studio construct built over a swimming pool, the water pressure was intense enough to overwhelm Keaton as he swung on the rope. He ended up inhaling so much water that he needed immediate medical attention.

“I had to go down to the doctor right there and then,” Keaton later said. “They pumped out my ears and nostrils and drained me, because when a full volume of water like that comes down and hits you and you’re upside down — then you really get it.”

3. Sherlock Jr. (1924)

Keaton directed and starred in Sherlock Jr. (1924), a comedy about a mild-mannered film projectionist who dreams of being a detective. He becomes engaged to a beautiful woman, then gets framed for theft by a romantic rival. Later he falls asleep in the projectionist booth and dreams of being the famed detective Sherlock Jr. In the dream, he solves a case of a stolen necklace and rescues his kidnapped fiancé.

In the process of evading the villains, Sherlock Jr. hops on a motorcycle. He soon loses control of the vehicle and speeds uncontrollably through busy roads, barely making it past moving trucks and a train, evading trees, dynamite, and collapsing bridges, before finally crashing through the window of a shack.

Camera tricks were employed for this scene, such as with the footage of the train. In real life, the train was running backward, and the footage was reversed to make it seem as though it was moving forward. However, the danger of the stunt was still very much real. During filming, Keaton crashed the motorcycle into two cameras and was thrown off the vehicle into a nearby car.

At another point in the film, while standing on the flat roof of a building, Keaton grabs an erect railway gate and rides it down into the backseat of a moving car. Had his timing been off, or if he had lost his grip or his balance, he could have fallen to the street or been struck by the car.

In another scene, Keaton ran on top of a moving boxcar train toward a water tower and grabbed its spout. He briefly dangled from the spout before it turned on, unleashing a stream of water upon him that was more intense than anticipated. Keaton was thrown to the ground and slammed his neck against a steel rail. He lost consciousness for a time and had to quit filming the rest of the day. Footage of this accident remained in the film.

Though he soon resumed his work, Keaton suffered what he described as “blinding headaches” for weeks afterward. It wasn’t until nine years later that a doctor x-rayed Keaton’s spine and spotted a fracture in his top vertebra. He had broken his neck on the set of Sherlock Jr. and hadn’t realized it, due to his high tolerance for pain.

At the time of its release, Sherlock Jr. received mixed reviews and underperformed at the box office. In 1991, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. It has since been hailed as a classic by modern critics and ranked among the best films of all time by Time magazine, the BBC, and the Motion Pictures Editors Guild.

4. The General (1926)

The General (1926), a comedy/drama taking place during the Civil War, is considered one of the greatest silent films of all time— and it contains the most expensive stunt in silent film history.

Loosely adapted from the 1889 memoir The Great Locomotive Chase by William Pittenger, The General is a fictionalized account of Union spies hijacking a Confederate train in 1862. In addition to starring as a young engineer who reclaims the train for the Confederate army, Keaton wrote and directed the film, while also dealing with budget issues, accidental forest fires, and subsequent lawsuits.

Keaton performed several dangerous stunts on and around the moving train, such as running along the roofs of railcars, jumping from an engine to a tender to a boxcar, riding the cowcatcher at the front of the train, and sitting on a coupling rod that connected the driving wheels. Had he fallen off the train at any point, Keaton could have been severely injured or even killed, either from the fall or from being run over.

In one stunt, Keaton jumps off the slow-moving train to dislodge a wooden beam jutting out from the track. Then, riding on the cowcatcher while carrying the beam, he sees another beam on the track ahead, and slams the beams together in a way that vaults them off the track. Had he not dislodged them in time, the resulting collision could have derailed the train.

At the film’s climax, the train crosses a burning bridge, which collapses, plunging the train into the Row River. The crew spent two weeks building a 215-foot-long trestle over the Row River, as well as a dam to make the water deeper. Dynamite was attached to the bridge’s supporting timbers.

This stunt cost $42,000, the modern equivalent of which would be over $600,000. As Keaton didn’t have the budget to rebuild the bridge or obtain a new locomotive, the stunt had to be recorded in just one take. It was Keaton’s wife, actress Natalie Talmadge, who convinced him not to drive the train. Instead, a papier-mâché dummy was placed at the controls.

Though not well received by critics at the time of its release, The General went on to be ranked among the greatest films ever made. In 1989, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, among other lauded films such as Casablanca (1942), Citizen Kane (1941), and Gone With the Wind (1939). Keaton once claimed it was the film he was most proud of.

5. Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)

Though Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) was not a box-office success at the time of its release, one particular stunt featured in the film became highly influential, and has been recreated and parodied in many films and television shows.

In the film, a boat captain named William “Steamboat Bill” Canfield Sr. maintains a rivalry with fellow captain J.J. King, who threatens to steal his customers. To make matters worse, Bill’s son, played by Keaton, develops a romantic relationship with King’s daughter, Kitty.

After a series of events lands Bill Sr. in jail and his son in the hospital, a cyclone hits, demolishing the buildings they’re held in. The cyclone scene cost $25,000, which made up one-third of the film’s budget, including breakaway sets and six enormous airplane propellers that were used as wind machines. To make him appear airborne, Keaton was suspended by a cable attached to a crane.

At some point, a house collapses on Keaton, and he’s saved only by an open window, which leaves him untouched. According to reports, the house came within two inches of crushing Keaton. This time Keaton avoided injury and death not with his stunt training, but by carefully marking off where he should stand in relation to the collapsing two-ton structure.

The cast and crew begged Keaton not to carry out this stunt and even threatened to quit the film over it. One cameraman admitted to looking away while filming. Not only did it go off without a hitch, it became the most famous scene of the film, and overall one of Keaton’s most famous stunts.

Keaton had previously done similar stunts with collapsing walls in the films Back Stage (1919) and One Week (1920). But those were not as dangerous as the collapsing house in Steamboat Bill, Jr., as they involved smaller, flimsier structures.

Originally published at http://sacha1689-laywd.wordpress.com on August 24, 2026.