Chaplin vs. Keaton, the battle rages on.
In Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Dreamers," there's a super-annoying scene in which our American hero (Michael Pitt) and his French friend (Louis Garrel) argue about the relative merits of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Like "Star Trek" or "Star Wars," Hatfields or McCoys, Republicans or Democrats, this is an argument in which two partisans will never find a compromise point. But in commercial terms? The battle's been over and won for years. While the bulk of Keaton's major silent-era work is respectably, completely (as far as I know) represented on DVD, the prints in circulation of his greatest work tend to be on the shoddy side. And those DVDs definitely aren't as lavish as those of Chaplin's films, which tend to be pristine and lavishly hagiographic; the Keaton DVDs are much more bare-bones. (The much-ballyhooed restored DVD set of five years ago is currently out of print, but Chaplin never dies:...
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