Steamboat Bill Jr (no 82)

by Allan Fish

(USA 1928 67m) DVD1/2

Storms clouds in the offing

p  Joseph M.Schenck  d  Charles Reisner  w  Carl Harbaugh, Buster Keaton  ph  J.Devereaux Jennings, Bert Haines  ed  J.Sherman Kell  art  Fred Kabourie

Buster Keaton (William Canfield Jnr), Ernest Torrence (William Canfield Jnr), Marion Byron (Kitty King), Tom Lewis (Tom Carter, 1^st mate), Tom McGuire (J.J.King),

When he wrote of Buster Keaton, David Thomson talked not just of Keaton’s genius as a physical comedian, but as an evoker of period and place.  Other masterpieces The General and Our Hospitality were superb examples of this, and Steamboat Bill Jnr, his last film made under his control before punishment under the creative suffocation of MGM, certainly is.

            Though set in the present, only the automobiles and the heroine’s wardrobe really tell us so.  In every other respect it could be the late 19^th century and we could be in Mark Twain country.  We’re in the fictional town of River Junction, where two rival steamboat owners are battling it out for supremacy of the Mississippi.  The winner in every respect is J.J.King, whose state of the art boat makes that of rival William Canfield, a dilapidated relic of days gone by, seem like the accident waiting to happen it surely is.  To compound matters, Canfield receives a telegram from Boston advising him that the son he hasn’t seen since he was a baby is arriving to join him imminently.  He expects a big strapping lad who he can share a chaw of tobacco with.  Instead, he gets Buster, kitted out like he’s just escaped from one of the more flagrant Oxford colleges, complete with striped boating jacket, bow tie and beret.  Needless to say, he doesn’t exactly endear himself to his father’s affections.  Buster’s only ally is a girl he knew in Boston, Kitty, but she happens to be the daughter of his father’s rival – oh how Buster loved his family feuds. Canfield arranges for his son to go back where he came, but just as he’s about to, King arranged for Canfield to get put inside the jailhouse, and then a storm rises up which threatens the safety of the entire settlement.

            Some have criticised the film for saving everything for its climax, which though to a certain extent true is rather unfair.  One can compare it to the earlier comedy Seven Chances, which was certainly made a classic Keaton vehicle by its legendary climax involving hordes of women and runaway boulders.  In some ways, however, the cyclone that provides Steamboat’s denouement is very much in keeping with what has gone before, literally blowing away the remnants of the sleepy town, in which the first few reels literally are the calm before the storm.  Those opening reels still contain much to be grateful for.  There’s the meeting cute of hero and heroine in adjoining barber’s chairs and Buster’s arrival in the white carnation, he and his father narrowly missing each other in trademark Stoneface fashion.  And then there’s the legendary loaf sequence where Buster tries to break his father out of jail.  He takes him a loaf, which he carries like a new born babe.  His father, disgusted with his son, doesn’t want it, and Buster spends the next few minutes trying to let his father know what he’s concealed inside.  Then, just as he’s about to get the loaf to his father, it reveals its contents.  It must have happened “when the dough fell in the tool chest” Buster bemoans.

            It’s when the cyclone arrives that we get the really immortal moments, and one in particular, as the side of a house falls on Buster only to be reprieved by a small window in the façade landing over him.  It’s a miracle of timing – and of danger – which he had tested on a much smaller scale in his short One Week, but perfected here.  Throw in magnificent sequences involving a stage backdrop, being blown about in the wind, in and out of a dog kennel, and a whole house falling on him, from which he calmly walks out by the front door, and we have pure poetry.  Eventually, he’s unceremoniously dumped into the lake after hanging onto a tree, and has the opportunity to save his girl, his father, and his prospective father-in-law, before, it seems, jumping overboard and abandoning them.  Not a bit, he’s just gone to fetch the preacher.  Inspired, truly inspired.