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"Well, a steamboat is a female, you know?" The kinship with Twain is promptly registered, "demon rum" aboard the vessel damned by the New Moses (Berton Churchill) and peddled by the old goat (Will Rogers). (The proselytizer dons top hat and stogie with his white robes, the captain still has his Confederate cap amid the cabin bric-à-brac.) The nephew (John McGuire) accidentally kills a man for the bayou runaway (Anne Shirley), a bit of drama in the lackadaisical domain—his bedtime disturbed, the sheriff (Eugene Pallette) leans out the window and tosses the jailhouse keys to the accused. Up and down the Mississippi in search of the witness, race to Baton Rouge against the rival bullfrog (Irvin S. Cobb). "Get that floatin' hen house outta the way!" John Ford one year after Vigo's L'Atalante, a treasure trove of oddball graces. History is an abandoned wax museum cheerfully repainted, the Virgin Queen becomes Pocahontas and bearded prophets become the James Brothers with pistol in hand. The mob that comes with torches and axes is pacified by the pageantry, nothing is more pointedly funny than the Southern crowd frozen in teary salute before a peeling General Lee dummy while Stepin Fetchit warbles "Dixie" behind the dusty minstrelsy machine. Buoyant turns on an elemental stage, the community is there to hum a few bars during a wedding behind bars or to cheer the spectacle on margins of the river. The Griffithian rescue is prepared with dashes of Keaton, Steamboat Bill, Jr. but also The General, into the furnace go the effigies of the past. "You gonna burn up George Washington?!" An American vision to tickle Renoir, who surely studied it for Swamp Water. With Francis Ford, Roger Imhof, Raymond Hatton, and Hobart Bosworth. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |