Busterlvr

📷 Buster Keaton and Dorothy Sebastian photographed for the 1929 film “Spite Marriage”

“He was never more glamorous than in stills taken around 1930, when he was unhappily under contract at MGM. Even while the studio miscast Buster in films as a pathetic, nerdy shrimp, their portrait photographers immortalized his sculptured handsomeness and sex appeal weighted by hypnotic stillness. In photographs by George Hurrell, Clarence Sinclair Bull and Ruth Harriet Louise, Buster broods in tailored suits or natty, deco sport clothes, crisp shirts as perfect as Gatsby’s, even white sweaters and plus-fours. His innate physical elegance makes him incapable of an unbecoming posture. His profile is classically noble, his cheekbones high and chiseled. His huge, dark, heavy-lidded, long-lashed eyes burn with oblique intensity. Like Valentino, Garbo and Marilyn Monroe, Buster could lower his eyelids halfway and gaze out from under them, but his look is not so much come-hither as beyond reach” - Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy by Imogen Sara Smith