|
Buster Keaton's resemblance to William S. Hart is not lost on the auteur, who doesn't so much spoof as crystallize the essential solitude of the frontier pioneer. "Friendless" the existential Indiana tenderfoot, whose belongings all fit on a mattress and are traded for a loaf of bread and salami which keep dwindling over the course of the journey. Literally trampled by big-city crowds, he heeds Horace Greeley's advice and is reborn by way of an exploding barrel out of a moving train. "Do you need any cowboys today?" The West is an endless dusty plain studded with cacti and swarming with unfriendly critters—and a friendly one, Brown Eyes the oddly expressive cow. The mutual respect of kindred loners is clinched when the novice cowhand removes a stone from her hoof, and the bovine heroine saves him from being gored (horns are attached to the camera to lend the steer's POV as it pounds toward the protagonist's backside). Keaton's transcendent comedy of inadequacy takes note of the tiny revolver that gets lost inside the holster and the oversized horse that waits with Balthazar's patience as the runty hero climbs onto the saddle via rope ladder. The late-to-the-table running gag is reversed richly, the braided burlesque of The Virginian and Broken Blossoms has The Great Stone Face unable to produce a smile (a sublime close-up) while conquering the rival gunfighter's trigger finger. Not just the bull in the china shop for the climactic stampede, but the bull in the barbershop and the sauna and everywhere in downtown Los Angeles, a chase sculpted as in Seven Chances with beautiful and precise camera movement. (Imamura in Pigs and Battleships pays vehement tribute.) With Kathleen Myers, Howard Truesdale, and Ray Thompson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |