Steamboat Bill, Jr.

I’ve always been very fond of Buster Keaton. This is hardly an unusual position among film buffs, but as the history of films gets longer and longer, how many people do any serious watching of movies made when Coolidge was president? For the vast majority of movie watchers, anything over a year old is musty; they’d rather watch new crap than old gems, as if newness alone is some guarantee of quality. It isn’t.

The real fear people have of old movies is that they simply won’t do the job a movie is supposed to do. Without all of today’s technical tricks, they just won’t transport you. Which is nonsense, but pretty pervasive nonsense. The power of movies is not mitigated by time, any more than the power of painting is mitigated over time. Are there people around who don’t want to look at Monet or Rembrandt or Fra Angelico only because they lived a long time ago? Some things are different about modern works compared to older works, but the power remains, and if it’s good, the power will be exerted. Sit in the movie theater, and if the movie is good, it doesn’t matter if it was made in 1928 or 2012. A couple of recent films, The Artist and Hugo, have made this argument, each in its own way. One hopes that their influence—you can’t swing a cat down Main Street, USA, these days without hitting a screening of Melies Le Voyage dans la lune—will last beyond their own newness.

I bring this up because I watched Steamboat Bill, Jr. last night. It’s on Netflix instant, so it’s not exactly hard to come by. And it was absolutely a joy. First, it’s pretty straightforward comedy, as Buster comes to see the father he never knew, who is running a decrepit steamboat. There’s a predictable story of the father’s rich business enemy (a one-percenter we’d call him now) and his daughter, Buster’s love from back in Boston. (Why is Boston automatically considered the home of the milquetoast?) There’s plenty of business and entertainment, leading up to one of the most remarkable film sequences I have ever scene, the cyclone that is the dramatic conclusion of the picture. And I mean dramatic! The whole town is blown apart, and that famous building falls right on top of Buster—almost. Then the cyclone pulls up a tree and flies him away, and you’re wondering, how much money did they spend on this sucker anyhow? In any case, there are laugh-out-loud funny bits, but mostly there’s the joy, first, of the deadpan Keaton doing character comedy, and then the deadpan Keaton doing (inimitable) physical comedy.

Wonderful stuff.