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"Le vent se lève..." Rival vessels down Mississippi way, the "floating palace" of The King versus the aquatic jalopy of the Stonewall Jackson, cp. Tashlin's Porky's Railroad. The grizzled skipper (Ernest Torrence) is about to be run out of business by the prosperous tycoon (Tom McGuire), his hopes of a helpful heir are dashed as soon as Buster Keaton materializes with pencil mustache and ukulele as the estranged son from Boston. The dainty beret must go, bowler and boater and a certain trademark porkpie hat adorn the impassive lad in a quicksilver makeover scene, he arrives at the steamer in fancy naval duds. ("No jury would convict you," quips Dad's assistant, handing him a revolver.) Ropes and levers, cabin doors and windows and the muddy waters beneath it all, a geometric playground to match The Navigator. "I'm trying to teach you to run it, not wreck it!" Charles Reisner is the nominal director, though the limpid mise en scène at the junction of the Freudian and the elemental is Keaton's and no one else's. The ingénue (Marion Byron) awaits aboard the competitor's ferry but the crucial relationship remains between dandified runt and towering paterfamilias—the old man seethes in jail, Junior enters with inside-out umbrella in hand, breakout instruments tumble out of the loaf of bread he's cradling. "That must of happened when the dough fell in the tool chest." A flattening cyclone provides the extended pièce de résistance, a procession of gags and stunts as wild as any Fleischer cartoon and as oneiric as Un Chien Andalou. The bed blown out of the hospital and into the barnyard, the leap into the painted landscape, the attic window on the collapsing house and the hugged tree trunk that takes flight, the prodigious last explosion of Keaton's independent period. The existential jest is carried to the finish, am I the flotsam in the storm or, as the poet has it, "the captain of my soul"? In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |