STEAMBOAT BILL, JR. (1928) B/W "silent" 70m dir: Charles F. Reisner

w/Buster Keaton, Ernest Torrence, Marion Byron

Keaton, a recent Yale graduate, comes home after many years to find his father, an irascible Mississippi riverboat captain, in deep trouble with a competing big company. Buster saves the day, though he must brave jail and a great hurricane to do it. One of the best comedies ever made. Wait till you see that hurricane sequence: it will thrill you with its sheer audacity in a way stunts done today simply cannot.

From Georges Sadoul's Dictionary of Films : "This is one of the best Keatons, almost as good as The General . ... The student arrives fashionably dressed with a mustache and 'Oxford bags.' He tries on a number of hats and rejects in horror the typical Keaton flat hat. The dramatic and comic high point of the film is the sequence of the cyclone that blows everything in front of it: houses fly away and a house front collapses on Keaton who is not at all astonished that he is saved by a window opening in the facade. Toward the end, he flies away on a tree. Only the old boat resists the storm. All the forces of nature attack Keaton, who makes no attempt to control them and doesn't even seem to resent them, but uses them instead to perform a kind of free ballet."