Samuel Beckett meets Buster Keaton in a controversial one-character drama. It is certainly no accident that Beckett wrote his only film scenario expressly for Keaton. In his great silents, Buster's unsmiling stoicism is more than a comic mask: in its stone-faced acceptance of the most absurd and terrifying catastrophes, Keaton's face reflects a profound vision of man's need to adapt to a hostile and alien environment, to outwit all the tricks of fate and chance, to refuse to be surprised by the world, to concentrate with prodigious energy on one's immediate condition. Keaton in his best films is a far greater existential poet than Beckett, who might admit this himself.