Buster Keaton Collection Vol. 5: Three Ages and 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.