The day Buster Keaton died of cancer.
It's so ironic - Buster was the youngest of the "Big Three" (the others being Chaplin and Lloyd), yet he was the first to go. They died in reverse order of age: Buster, Harold, Charlie.
Buster will always be the king, in my opinion. Far more talented than Lloyd or Chaplin, more inventive, more creative. Engineer, dancer, stuntman, acrobat, filmmaker, comedian, actor.
He was well aware (unlike Chaplin) that the camera was another participant in films, and made full use of it. For Buster, the camera was just as important as anyone and everyone in front of it. He used his innate skill to make eleven exposures of himself on one strip of film (something the cameraman said was impossible) in The Playhouse. He put the camera underwater in The Navigator. He had an understanding of the mechanics of filmmaking that remains unparalleled.
And he could be sentimental without being maudlin, unlike Chaplin, who always begged the audience to feel sorry for his Little Tramp character. Lloyd was better at sentiment (as in Girl Shy), but Buster was the Everyman, the human Timex, who rolled with the punches and got the girl in the end.
Sherlock, Jr. was, and is, a true landmark of filmmaking; every single gag works perfectly. Buster even acted as stunt double for one of his costars, because he knew how to take a fall better than anyone in the business. Riding the handlebars of a motorcycle directly across the path of an oncoming train; hanging from a water tower and falling to the train tracks as the force of the water causes him to loosen his grip (he broke his neck doing that stunt, by the way); jumping "through" a person and the fence behind that person; playing an extremely complicated game of pool. Buster could do it all.
Here's to the greatest genius Hollywood will ever know.
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