Why Buster Keaton – not Tom Cruise – is cinema's greatest daredevil

Telegraph

20-05-2025

It's a miracle that Tom Cruise is still alive. During a four-decade-long career, he's dangled from a flying Airbus A400M, sprinted down the world's tallest building, corkscrew-turned a helicopter past a mountain and driven a motorbike off the side of a cliff. The trailer for the new Mission: Impossible film shows Cruise trapped in a flooding submarine and clinging onto the wing of a careering biplane.
Surely he's now the greatest daredevil in the history of cinema? Well, not quite. That title should go to Buster Keaton, the doe-eyed, stoney-faced maverick of the silent film era, whose extraordinary stunts make Tom Cruise look risk-averse.
The two stars have a lot in common. They were both obsessed with cinema as the supreme medium for telling stories; both transcended their positions as actors to become the presiding maestros of their films; and both were absolutely committed to performing their own wild, ridiculous stunts – often badly injuring themselves in the process.
But while Cruise exploits his stunts for maximum emotional impact, Keaton was studiously undemonstrative, retaining his deadpan expression however surreal his surroundings. Whereas Cruise embeds his action sequences in complicated plots about the end of the world, Keaton contrived action sequences from everyday life. Cruise takes pride in having a superbly athletic body well into his 60s – Keaton just wanted his wiry, diminutive frame (two inches shorter even than Cruise's) to be as damage-proof as possible.
It needed to be. Keaton put his body through more than almost any other actor in the history of cinema – only Jackie Chan bears comparison. He launched it through windows and walls, tossed it down waterfalls and between rooftops, raced it away from armies of marauding cattle and furious boulders, attached it to the front of out-of-control motorbikes and steam trains, and pinned it to the back of trams, vans and cars which yanked him along so quickly that his feet left the floor.
He was born in 1895 to vaudevillian parents who almost immediately incorporated their son into their act. In fact, baby Keaton once pre-empted their intentions and crawled on-stage to interrupt his parents' performance. His first billing was at 11 months old, and his preternatural talent meant that he was soon listed above his parents on posters for their family's show.
But the work itself was (literally) bruising, to say the least. 'My father used to carry me on stage and drop me,' Keaton recalled. 'After explaining to the audience that I liked it, he would pick me up and throw me at a piece of scenery.' Sometimes he would be thrown into the startled audience; once he thumped into a brick wall behind the staging. On another occasion, he flew as far as thirty feet. A popular incarnation of the Keaton family show dubbed Buster 'the human mop' and saw his father literally wipe the stage floor with his son (think Anton du Beke with Ann Widdecombe).
Keaton was a vaudevillian by trade but his aspirations lay in Hollywood. A friend put him in contact with Rosco 'Fatty' Arbuckle, a famous silent film actor and impresario, and by the 1920s Keaton was starring in short comedies. 'From the first day on I hadn't a doubt that I was going to love working in the movies… I'd fallen in love with the cameras, with the rushes, the action, the slam-bang – with all of it,' he said.
That quote could come from Tom Cruise, who reportedly watches a film every day and fights a one-man war against releasing movies onto streaming services without giving them a proper showing in cinemas first. Making films, says Cruise, 'is not what I do. It's who I am.'
Keaton's stunts, like Cruises, were distinctively cinematic. They were of a scale and ingenuity that simply wasn't possible on stage. Look at his wild ride on a driver-less motorbike in Sherlock Jr., or his stroll through a hurricane in Steamboat Bill, Jr., as houses fly into his path and shatter in front of him.
Although these sequences were impossible in vaudeville, Keaton retained that tradition's commitment to doing things for real. Cinema gave performers more opportunity for baroque trickery – as when Keaton steps out of the movie screen and goes on an adventure through different film reels in Sherlock Jr. – but it also allowed viewers to see miraculous set-pieces being done with real objects. As Keaton put it: 'The camera allowed you to show your audience the real thing, real trains, horses and wagons, snowstorms, floods.'
And so when Keaton appears to crash out of a window, that really is him doing exactly that. 'For a real effect and to convince people that it's on the level, do it on the level.' That's Keaton talking but, again, it may as well be Cruise. When once asked why he insisted on doing his own stunt work, Cruise replied: 'No one asked Gene Kelly 'Why do you do your own dancing?''
Neither star could imagine doing things differently, no matter the cost to their bodies, which looked something like this:
Cruise: Broken foot while rock-climbing up an inverted cliff face; broken ankle while jumping between buildings.
Keaton: Broken ankle after tumbling down an escalator; sprained ankle after jumping between buildings and rolling down the side of a wall; hugely painful and prolonged inflammation of his elbow after falling from the top of a barn; multiple instances of nearly drowning while filming outrageous water stunts; broken neck after being bombarded with water (nobody even noticed for this particular injury 30 years, during which time Keaton had continued performing uncomplainingly).
All this bodily commitment gave both stars unusual influence over their productions. By the mid-1920s Keaton was directing his films as well as acting in them – the critic Roger Ebert called Keaton 'the greatest actor-director in the history of movies'. Meanwhile, Cruise is a hugely involved producer with massive leverage in Hollywood and exceptional authority on set (memorably displayed when he ordered most of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning's crew to leave so that he could swearily berate two members who'd broken Covid restrictions).
Keaton's authority was ultimately short-lived. He lost control of his own films to producer extraordinaire Irving Thalberg when he joined MGM and, besides, the coming of the 'talkies' meant that this most silent of silent comedians – who shunned even using intertitles – had a dim future after the introduction of sound. He began to drink heavily and struggled to receive work or recognition towards the end of his life, although he eventually found cinephile admirers in France. He died in 1966, aged 70.
Yet Keaton's work has aged extraordinarily well. Its wordless simplicity gives it a direct power that doesn't date – shunning old-timey, 'I say, mister!' intertitles was ultimately a shrewd move – and those ultra-clippable stunts now appear precision-engineered for the TikTok age. (A montage of Keaton's best bits on TikTok has nearly 500,000 likes.)
Almost 60 years after his death, we can safely say that the 'human mop' done good. But head-to-head, stunt v stunt, is he really more impressive than Tom Cruise?
Cruise versus Keaton: Their best stunts head-to-head
Leaps of faith
Tom Cruise's rooftop chase scene (Mission: Impossible – Fallout)
While filming this leap between buildings near St Paul's in London for Mission Impossible: Fallout, Cruise missed his landing and slammed his up-turned foot against the wall. He 'knew instantly it was broken' and the foot was still healing during the film's press tour.
Buster Keaton's building jump (Three Ages, 1923)
This jump from Three Ages was also botched – Keaton was originally meant to reach the second building but missed the ledge and fell down the side of the wall. Although there was a safety net to catch him, he bruised himself enough to delay filming. When the shoot re-started, Keaton built the rest of this elaborate sequence around his mistake.
Winner: Keaton
Swing time
Tom Cruise climbs the world's tallest building (Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol)
In Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Cruise's Ethan Hunt sprints down the side of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, before swinging around its sides, and then leaping towards an open window. That's really Cruise 130 floors up in the air, carried only by a single wire. It's stomach-turningly vertiginous cinema, and Cruise's most famous set-piece for a reason.
Buster Keaton
As the finale of Our Hospitality, Keaton swings to the rescue to grab his girlfriend as she plummets down a waterfall. The waterfall was built as a gigantic set on the Paramount lot, and the girl Keaton catches is a dummy (perhaps obviously, to modern eyes). But Keaton did the stunt for real, getting the final shot on the third take after swallowing a dangerous amount of gushing water on the first two.
Winner: Cruise
Motorbike madness
The biggest stunt in cinema history (Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning)
The marketing for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning billed this as 'the biggest stunt in cinema history'. Cruise drives a motorbike over the edge of a cliff, before free-falling through the air and parachuting towards a steam train. An extraordinary moment, slightly undermined by excessive promotion that reduced its impact in cinemas, and the odd CGI ridge that Cruise speeds up before flying into the air.
Buster Keaton
The hero of Sherlock Jr, Keaton's masterpiece, ends up perched on the front of a motorbike without a driver, as it speeds through an incredible series of hair-rasing near-misses. Highlights include crossing an unfinished bridge by gliding over a pair of vans that momentarily fill the gap, dodging an incoming train by an inch and – in a potentially jarring tonal shift that Keaton somehow pulls off – flying through the air to kick a sex pest through the wall of a barn.
Winner: Keaton
Water shows
Tom Cruises's explosive fishtank (Mission: Impossible)
In the first Mission: Impossible film, Cruise's character smashes the glass of a huge aquarium and then leaps into the street as 16 gallons of water and glass cascade around him. Director Brian De Palma had set the standard for the rest of the franchise, but it says a lot about Cruise's work since that this is far from his most impressive stunt.
Buster Keaton
In Sherlock Jr., Keaton races across train carriages before grabbing a water spout to lower himself to the ground. In doing so he unleashes a torrent of water onto his head and almost drowns himself. This was the stunt that broke Keaton's neck – not that he noticed until three decades later.
Winner: Keaton
By a hair's breadth
Mission: Impossible's wire heist
The defining image of the Mission: Impossible series came in its first instalment. Cruise's character has to infiltrate a CIA vault by dangling from the ceiling – at one point dropping to within millimetres of the ground. 'I kept going down to the floor and bam, I kept hitting my face,' Cruise recalled. But the effort was worth it – the sequence is still the most nail-biting of the franchise.
A house falls on Buster Keaton
In Steamboat Bill, Jr., the facade of a hurricane-battered house falls onto our protagonist, who has the cosmic good luck to be standing in the perfect spot for an open window to save him. Had Keaton been standing two inches out of place in any direction then the collapsing scenery would likely have killed him. He later recalled that when the wall fell 'two extra women on the sidelines fainted and the cameramen turned their backs as they ground out the film'. One of the most memorable moments in silent cinema and Keaton's apotheosis.