Three Ages (1923)

Three Ages is a 1923 black-and-white American feature-length silent comedy film starring comedian Buster Keaton and Wallace Beery. The first feature Keaton wrote, directed, produced, and starred in (unlike The Saphead, in which he only acted), Keaton structured the film like three inter-cut short films. While Keaton was a proven success in the short film medium, he had yet to prove himself as a feature-length star. It has been alleged that, had the project flopped, the film would have been broken into three short films, although this has been disputed by film historians who note that neither Keaton nor his associates made this claim in their lifetimes. The structure also worked as a parody of D. W. Griffith's 1916 film Intolerance.