DVD of the Week: Steamboat Bill, Jr.

In the clip above, I discuss Buster Keaton’s last film as an independent producer, “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” It’s the film in which he executed a literally death-defying gag that is justly famed for its minimalist temerity: in the midst of a (fan-generated) windstorm, the front of a house falls down and an upper-story window frame lands serendipitously around the stock-still, seemingly oblivious man. Keaton, in a 1965 discussion with John Gillett and James Blue (available in a recent compilation of his interviews edited by Kevin W. Sweeney), explained what went into the moment:

We built the window so that I had a clearance of two inches on each shoulder, and the top missed my head by two inches and the bottom my heels by two inches. We mark that ground out and drive big nails where my two heels are going to be. Then you put that house back up in position while they finish building it. They put the front on, painted it, and made the jagged edge where it tore away from the main building; and then we went in and fixed the interiors so that you’re looking at a house that the front has blown off. Then we put up our wind machine with the big Liberty motors. We had six of them and they are pretty powerful: they could lift a truck right off the road. Now we had to make sure that we were getting our foreground and background wind effect, but that no current ever hit the front of that building when it started to fall, because if the wind warps her she’s not going to fall where we want her, and I’m standing right out front. But it’s a one-take scene and we got it that way. You don’t do those things twice.

In 1963, in The New Yorker, Keaton told Gardner Botsford and Brendan Gill, “I can tell you one thing—when the house started falling, I didn’t sway.”

In “Tempest in a Flat Hat,” a biography of Keaton, Edward McPherson noted, “Few of the crew had the stomach to watch.” He also reported, with a touch of melodrama that seems a bit exaggerated, that “Buster felt he had nothing to lose. The day before he had gotten the news: the Keaton Studio was shutting down.”

Reviewing the film for the Times at the time of its 1928 release, Mordaunt Hall called the movie “a sorry affair,” asserted that “the producer appears to rely chiefly on water and smashing scenery to create fun,” said that the film became “more tedious in every scene,” and concluded that “Mr. Keaton preserves his stoicism, but while watching this film one feels that one looked rather like Mr. Keaton the greater part of the time, which is probably not exactly what Mr. Keaton was aiming at.” In other words, the reviewer sat stonily and didn’t laugh. Here at The New Yorker, it got a capsule review—in its entirety, “Buster Keaton being very funny.”

Hall got one thing right: if Keaton was indeed a stoic, he was one in the classical Greek sense, of maintaining self-control and discipline as a virtue, of virtue being in inherent harmony with nature, and of virtue being the sole possible source of happiness (that of the character of Steamboat Bill, Jr., if not of Keaton himself). And if Keaton didn’t exactly play characters utterly devoid of will, he at least portrayed those who were pure of heart. With his deliberately narrowed range of expression, he magnifies his disappointment with humanity in infinitesimal gestures; yet the great torrents and tempests unleashed in “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” suggest a metaphysical coincidence between the forces of nature and those of his own virtuous desires.