The Shape of Film To Come | The Public | Steamboat Bill, Jr. | Highlights
Very lucky, those being introduced to Joseph “Buster” Keaton, monarch of sophisticated slapstick. But those who’ve been watching the straight-faced comedian all their lives are surprised with every new viewing. Keaton was as gifted an engineer of gags as he was an expert of the existentially emotionless closeup. “Frigo” they called him in France, slang for a refrigerator; sometimes it was “the man who never smiles” or, in honor of a metaphysical short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Great Stone Face.”
In a 1946 interview with Marcel Lapierre, Keaton explained the flywheel of his comedy: “The greater a comic’s indifference, the more astonished he seems by the public’s laughter.’ Keaton had a neutrality made for cinema, that broke with the tradition of comic theatrical gesticulations in favor of the slight, nonplussed reactions. His was a quality that will never go out of style; think of James Bond’s registering nothing after some gigantic explosion, except maybe to reach to his throat and straighten his tie.
There was never a gag too cartoonish for Keaton. The High Sign, one of the two films revived at Cinequest, has him paint a hook on the wall, which he then hangs his hat upon. As comedian and inventor, Keaton was the proto-cartoon; the great animators learned from him. Odd that the crude Disney-Iwerks Mickey Mouse cartoon Steamboat Willie is now better known than the film that sired it, Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr.
But Keaton’s best works, sometimes a century old, have aged well because of the way they’re built. His films work as comedies and adventures. And in the indirectly comic scenes (that is, where he’s in situations where he hasn’t registered the trouble beginning) Keaton shows himself as an actor of great sensitivity and soul, far too dry for pathos. Around him are gesticulating bullies twice his size, or women sulking prettily, waiting to have their hurt feelings soothed; Buster can play all the dramatic beats a scene requires.
Thinking of Keaton, one considers his ingenuity in flashes. Search for Steamboat Bill, Jr, on YouTube, and you find a clip titled “A House Falls on Buster Keaton.” One could as easily search for items such as “Buster Keaton rides a sinking boat to the bottom of the ocean”; or “Buster Keaton walks into a movie screen and takes his place in action on screen,” or “is almost eaten alive by a roll of flypaper,” or “chased down a hill by rolling boulders,” or “swings across a waterfall like Spider-Man,” or “lights his cig from the fuse of an anarchists’ bomb.”
More than one house falls on Buster during the fantastic windstorm scene in Steamboat Bill Jr, in which the propwash of six big aircraft engines blows away the village he’d built, for a cost of about $400,000 in 1920s money. But the most famous housefall is the entire front of a two-story house, with one tiny open window just wide enough to save him. The set weighed a couple of tons and would have squashed Keaton as flat as his hat if he hadn’t done the math. (The mark Keaton had to hit was quite smalla nail, apparently.)
Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) is more than just the house falling on Buster. It’s a story of obsolescence and filial disappointment. It was shot alongside the Sacramento River in Westport, just outside of the state capital, posing beautifully as the riparian American South. Keaton becomes the focal point of a struggle between a top-hatted monopolist named King (Tom McGuire) and an old captain, his father: the Liam Neeson-like Ernest Torrence, owner of his paddle-wheeled tub the Stonewall Jackson.
Divorced, separated or otherwise, the riverboatman Steamboat Bill hasn’t seen his son since he was a baby. Bill Jr. grew up to be a proper Bostonian mollycoddle, in smart beret and French mustaches. His mortified father decides to make a man of this skinny, undersized youth, even as Keaton introduces a Montague-Capulet angle. By coincidence, Bill the Younger runs into a friend from back east, King’s collegiate daughter (Marion Byron).
The scene-by-scene stuff is of constant hilarity, sometimes dramatically dire: The big man ordering his son to strip, to get him into some proper work clothes, is a reminder of how fathers treated their sons a century ago. More often the comedy is lighter. Bill Senior is arrested by the sheriff. Visiting, Buster tries to signal to his dad, who has all but disowned him, that there’s some jailbreaking tools hidden in a home-baked loaf of bread. (Busted, Buster says, “That must have happened when the dough fell in the toolbox.”)
And there’s the finale of the ultimate blustery day, which blows him out of the hospital and crosstown in a rolling bed. Buster faces the catastrophe quizzically, because of several blows to the head during the course of the day. The air of wooziness makes the nimble escapes even more startling.
Universally declared a masterpiece now, Steamboat Bill Jr. was a financial failure. It ended Keaton’s production company and sent him into inferior films, as well as a period of heavy drinking. Aversion therapy conquered the booze (“Just beer now!” he told an interviewer) and Keaton was revived and celebrated as a hero of cinema for many years before his death.
Relating the plot of a Keaton short is like being someone describing a dream. The opener “The High Sign” (1921) is about homicide at the seaside. Bumming around a Santa Cruz-like boardwalk, Keaton notices an ad in a tarp-size newspaper, seeking a shill at a shooting gallery. The boss of the arcadewhich ends up looted and shot to piecesis the leader of an infamous gang called the Blinking Buzzards. (Their secret sign of recognition is like a double-thumbing of the nose.) Drafted into their ranks, Buster flinches away from the skull he’s supposed to be swearing an oath uponand it nips his fingers.
The climax takes place in a cutaway two-story house ridden with booby traps, secret passages and chutes. Buster slides through walls and crashes through swivelling doors, while saving the wealthy miser August Nicklenurser from a squad of buzzards, thus winning the tightwad’s dim, uke-playing daughter. If Jerry Lewis is a genius for going all in on the famous three-story cutaway set in The Ladies Man, and if Wes Anderson is a genius for remembering Jerry and duplicating that set aboard the Belafonte in The Life Aquatic…all one can add is that Buster was there first, as always, for evermore. Chances are this Keaton double-bill will be someone’s first experience with silent film, and it would be hard to pick a better first time.
Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Mar 15, 7pm
California Theatre, San Jose
cinequest.org
