42. Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928)

Directed By Charles Reisner & Buster Keaton

Synopsis

Steamboat Bill owns steamboat. King is steamboat's Rupert Murdoch. King comes to town to put Bill out of business. Bill Jr. arrives from Boston all poncified, Bill teaches him to be tough. By strange coincidence Bill Jr. is in love with King's daughter. Hurricane comes, Bill Jr. saves the day and gets the girl! Houses do cartwheels, yipeee.

Review

Buster Keaton never disappoints. He is consistently brilliant in his films, not just due to the visual gags but because of the sheer complexity of the sets in this case. The final scene of the film which involves a hurricane devastating a small town is extremely complicated, parts of houses fly about, a house lands on Keaton, a wall falls on him and he escapes by luckily standing on the exact spot where the 2x2 feet hole of a window falls. One foot left and Keaton would be dead.

Keaton just had the guts that no one else had at the time, this is complemented by his amazing artistic vision, which I think is most distilled in the short Sherlock Jr. but is present here in a most spectacular way. That is why his films were so successful and why in this list he is the greatest representative of silent comedy. We have reviewed one Chaplin film (there will be 2 more, one of which is silent) and one Harold Lloyd, but 5 Keaton's.

So frankly, Chaplin is overrated and Keaton is immensly underrated. When we look at images of silent film comedies they always seem to portray facile obvious slapstick or charming naivité. That is just not true. I thought I should write this as we are approaching the end of the silent era on this blog. I never imagined to be so surprised by the quality, innovation and experimentalism of these early films. I feel a better and more complete person for having watched them. So should you.

Back to Steamboat Bill... a truly amazing film, not much can be said about it that I haven't said in previous reviews of Keaton. He stands heads and shoulders about any other silent comedian. All you need to know. Buy it now at Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Steamboat Bill's finest moments come during its cyclone sequence. The film was shot in Sacramento, building $135,000 worth of breakaway street sets on a riverbank and then filming their systematic destruction with six powerful Liberty-motor wind machines and a 120-foot crane. Keaton himself, who calculated and performed his own stunts, was suspended on a cable from the crane and hurled him from place to place, as if airborn. The resulting sequence on film is astonishing and still watchable as spectacle, if not comedy. And it comes punctuated by Keaton's single most famous stunt. Keaton stands in the street, making his way through the destruction, when an entire building facade collapses onto him. The attic window fits neatly around Keaton's body as it falls, coming within inches of flattening him. Keaton did the stunt himself with a real building section and no trickery. It has been claimed that if he had stood just inches off of the correct spot Keaton would have been seriously injured or killed. The stunt has been re-created several times on film and television, though usually with facades made from lighter materials.

The director was Charles Reisner, the credited writer was Carl Harbaugh (although Keaton wrote the film and publicly called Harbaugh useless but "on the payroll"), and also starred Ernest Torrence, Marion Byron, and Tom Lewis.

The movie was parodied by Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie, which also was the first Mickey Mouse movie to become commercially successful..