General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Cameraman

The Cameraman is a 1928 American silent romantic comedy starring Buster Keaton as a tintype photographer who buys a motion picture camera to win the attention of a woman working for MGM's newsreel department. It was Keaton's first film after he signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, produced by Keaton and directed by Edward Sedgwick, and it is widely regarded as the last great film of his silent career.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	Premiered in New York on 22 September 1928; copyright registered 15 September 1928 (LP25722)³
Format	Black-and-white silent, eight reels, 6,995 feet; running time listed at 76 minutes³^•¹
Principal cast	Buster Keaton (Buster), Marceline Day (Sally), Harold Goodwin (Stagg), Sidney Bracey, Harry Gribbon, Edward Brophy, Vernon Dent, and Josephine the monkey³
Key crew	Director Edward Sedgwick; scenario Richard Schayer, from a screen story by Clyde Bruckman and Lew Lipton; cinematography Elgin Lessley and Reggie Lanning; editor Hugh Wynn³
Commercial result	Grossed $797,000, Keaton's highest returns to date, against a production budget of about $362,000¹^•⁴
Historical status	Keaton's first film for MGM and, by the account of film historian John Bengtson, his last great silent feature⁵

Spoilers

Plot

Buster, a hapless tintype (street portrait) photographer, bumps into Sally, a secretary in the MGM newsreel office, and falls in love. Believing he cannot compete for her affections with Harold Stagg, an established newsreel cameraman, he trades in his tintype camera at a pawnshop for an old, hand-cranked movie camera and tries to break into newsreel work.¹^•²

His early footage is incompetent: double exposures, tilted angles, and shots running backward, and his one subject is an organ grinder's monkey, Josephine, which he takes home as a pet. Sally tips him off about an impending tong war (war between Chinese secret-society gangs) in Chinatown; he films all the dangerous fighting only to discover he had no film in his camera.⁵^•² In the climax, Buster rescues Sally from drowning after she falls overboard during a regatta, but Stagg claims credit for the rescue. Buster is vindicated when Josephine, having secretly learned to crank the camera, has filmed the rescue, providing proof of his skill and bravery.⁶^•²

Production and the MGM contract

A change of circumstances. Since 1920 Keaton had run his own independent studio, Buster Keaton Productions, with a dedicated crew and nearly complete creative freedom under his producer, Joseph Schenck. After several features in a row lost money, including The General (1927), and with the industry's costly conversion to sound adding financial uncertainty, Schenck shut the studio and sold Keaton's contract to MGM. Keaton went reluctantly and later called the move the worst mistake of his life.²^•¹

Production began on 4 April 1928 under the working title Snap Shots, with New York location shooting from 12 April and MGM studio shooting from 1 May through 25 June 1928, followed by retakes on 4 to 6 August.⁵^•³ MGM imposed tighter schedules and required a finished script with the gags worked out in advance, a constraint on a comedian who had built his films by improvising on set. Keaton nonetheless battled for each gag, and the finished film is comparable in quality to his independent features.⁷^•⁸ Documentary footage of Gertrude Ederle and Charles A. Lindbergh appears in the film.³

Gags and set pieces

The film contains several of the most celebrated sequences of Keaton's career. In one, he pantomimes every role in a baseball game, alone in an otherwise empty Yankee Stadium, so that his filmed footage can be spliced into newsreel coverage.¹ The Chinatown tong war is a large-scale action set piece in which the legs of his tripod are shot out during a gunfight.⁹ A public swimming pool sequence generates a run of physical comedy around a shared changing room, and a piggy bank gag destroys his apartment wall instead of the bank.¹ The film's self-reflexive treatment of filmmaking, in which the camera itself drives the comedy, has drawn comparison with Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, released within a year of it.¹⁰

Reception and legacy

The Cameraman opened in September 1928 to positive rather than exceptional notices. Variety's reviewer described the familiar pattern of "a boob that does everything wrong and cashes in finally through sheer accident," dressed up with bright gags, and predicted general satisfaction. Commercially the film was a success, grossing $797,000, the highest returns of Keaton's career to that point, and Keaton himself considered it one of his best films.¹

A teaching print. MGM's writing department used the film for years as a model of a perfectly constructed comedy, running it so often for new writers and visiting comedians that prints struck from the original negative were damaged and a segment of the film remains missing.² Prints survive in the George Eastman Museum and Library of Congress film archives, and the film is in the public domain in the United States.³ The Criterion Collection issued a restoration on Blu-ray and DVD with supplementary features including a documentary on the shooting locations.¹¹^•¹²

The film also marks a turning point. Keaton's MGM contract ran from January 1928 to February 1933, and his standing at the studio deteriorated steadily; on his next film, Spite Marriage (1929), he was required to follow a detailed shooting script without significant deviation. The Cameraman was the last film on which he exercised substantial creative control, and film historians including David Robinson have described it as a summation of his career to that point.¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Early and silent cinema › Silent feature films › Released 1927 to 2012

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?