The Buster Keaton Collection: Volume 5 (Three Ages / Our Hospitality)

THREE AGES was Buster’s first foray into feature film production after a successful string of shorts. This hilariously inventive satire of D.W. Griffith’s INTOLERANCE follows the age-old story of misadventures on the road to finding love, retold in three separate eras, a structure that cleverly allowed Keaton to recut the film into three separate shorts if it failed as a feature. For this restoration, 5 elements were compared, with a second-generation duplicate negative being used for the majority.

OUR HOSPITALITY is perhaps Keaton’s most nuanced comedy and again finds Buster recreating a bygone era. In it, he plays a 19th-century New Yorker who returns to the antebellum South to claim his inheritance, but finds himself also inheriting a longstanding multi-generational feud between his family and that of the woman he loves (played by Buster’s real-life spouse, Natalie Talmadge). For this restoration, a total of 17 film elements were compared, with a first-generation nitrate positive held at the Library of Congress being the main element used.