Steamboat Bill, Jr.

The authentic Mississippi River setting (filmed along the Sacramento River delta) is but one of Steamboat Bill, Jr.’s many pleasures. The film seems to have a direct line to Keaton’s youth and soul in the tale of a sensitive lad trying to figure out the mettle of manhood in his overbearing dad. Buster with an umbrella against the fearsome storm that rips the houses off people’s lives; Buster drawn, as if in a dream, to an abandoned vaudeville theater: “Keaton’s most entertaining balance of the instinctual and the cerebral” (Sarris & Allen, The Village Voice). The climax is one of Keaton’s most dangerous and carefully planned stunts: Noting that the hospital in which he lies, and indeed the whole town, has flown away, he runs to stand in the street. A wall comes crashing down on him, but he passes, untouched, through an open window. The scene was done unfaked, with a real wall.