Three Ages│Eureka Entertainment
Courtesy of Eureka Entertainment
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
It seems staggering that, until now, Buster Keaton’s first full-length feature was not available on Blu-Ray in the UK. And yet Three Ages contains so many familiar and classic scenes in what is essentially a three-part romcom – not least the sequence in which Keaton jumps from one tall building to another, misses it, and then hurtles through three awnings to the street below.
As part of their Master of Cinema series, Eureka Entertainment is celebrating the hundredth anniversary of this seminal film that celebrates love throughout the ages. A thinly veiled parody of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, the silent features Keaton and his antagonist, Wallace Beery, in the Stone Age, in Roman times and in the modern age (that is, 1923). And the woman for whose affections both men duel for – billed purely as ‘the girl’ – is played by the British beauty queen Margaret Leahy, whose only film this was. Even this piece of casting is fascinating in its own right as Leahy would hardly represent Hollywood’s current ideal of beauty, for as timeless as Keaton’s comedy would appear, beauty would seem to have its seasons (cf. Barbie). Sadly, Leahy was never to appear in another film and in 1967, just one year after Keaton’s death, she took her own life by drinking drain cleaner. This package of mini-documentaries, commentary and film essays is full of fascinating titbits, such as when Henry Ford refused to talk to Keaton after his Model T disintegrated in one brief continuous shot, a scene that has baffled fans for a century.
A caption at the beginning of Three Ages states that “love is the unchanging axis on which the world revolves” and so three versions of Keaton compete for the hand of Leahy, who is repeatedly won over by Beery via a combination of brawn, money and underhand tactics. The film is by no means Keaton’s strongest, but it is the first feature that he wrote and directed – and starred in – and shows the comic genius that was to flourish in such classics as Sherlock Jr., Steamboat Bill, Jr. and The General. It is essentially a series of skits, varied according to their setting, and manages to astonish thanks to the comedian’s constant ingenuity, such as when the Roman Keaton unlocks his helmet and then clips it on to the wheel of his chariot to act as a wheel clamp. Or the sequence when he rides into shot on the back of a cartoon dinosaur – inspired by Gertie the Dinosaur – one of the first instances of combining live-action with animation (forty-one years before Mary Poppins).
Three Ages is not exactly hilarious, in spite of its frequent use of comic novelty, but it is a fascinating microcosm of a previous time and the stereotypes promoted back then. As usual with Eureka Entertainment, there is a bunch of fascinating bonus material, including an essay by Fiona Watson unlike any previous documentary on the Great Stone Face, which explores the psychology behind the comedy, the autistic genius, and the neurodiverse prodigy whose high pain tolerance helped to form some of the most iconic scenes in cinema.
Three Ages is now available on Blu-ray from Eureka Entertainment: https://eurekavideo.co.uk/movie/buster-keaton-three-ages/
Eureka Entertainment is the leading independent distributor of classic silent/early films in the UK. In 2004, Eureka! established the award winning Masters of Cinema Series, a specially curated director-led Blu-ray and DVD collection of classic and world cinema using the finest available materials for home viewing. In 2014, Eureka! established Eureka! Classics intended to highlight a broader selection of classic and cult cinema, and in 2017, Eureka! established Montage Pictures, a label celebrating ground-breaking and thought-provoking world cinema from new and upcoming directors.
