Buster Keaton by Edward McPherson

Author:Edward McPherson [Edward McPherson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571278800
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2011-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

It is a typically rich setup, one worthy of a Keaton fugue, but from the start Our Hospitality is unlike any of Buster’s previous work. It opens with a long prologue, which introduces the feud in grand, melodramatic strokes – a stormy night with heaving chests, expressionistic lighting, a rain-soaked duel, muzzle flares in the dark, a frightened wife, and a howling baby (Jimmy, who by the looks of it had a great set of lungs). A McKay and a Canfield kill each other. The baby, sent north for his protection, will grow up to be Buster. Almost eight minutes elapse without a joke.

Twenty years later, enter Willie McKay, Buster in a ridiculous top hat, whose first move is to mount a wonderful, outrageous, primitive pedal-less bicycle and propel himself effortlessly on two oversized wheels, his swinging feet just brushing the ground. We follow him as he glides down a bright dusty New York street, wobbling to a stop before a waistcoated ‘traffic cop.’ It is a dreamy, jaunty sequence, especially in comparison with the high drama of the prologue, and its understated humor speaks volumes about law and order in the North and South and the carefree life of a Yankee dandy. The prop was a reproduction of the Gentleman’s Hobby-Horse, the first-ever bicycle; the copy was so precise that the Smithsonian Institution asked to have it after the film was released.5 Buster’s ride through town is amusing (have you ever seen such a contraption?) and beautiful (how it flies!), but had this been a two-reeler, he would have smashed his bicycle by now – or at least fallen off. Something new was going on.

19 Buster astride the Gentleman’s Hobby-Horse built for Our Hospitality (1923).

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