Hollywood lore has it that Buster Keaton was suicidal during the production of Steamboat Bill, Jr. How else might one account for artist's acrobatic pratfalls? Or that famous sequence – one of cinema's finest acts of lunacy – in which Keaton stares unblinkingly into the camera as a house falls on him; he survives because he is perfectly framed by a window, which was just big enough to give Keaton two inches clearance on every side.
Keaton – who co-directed and wrote Steamboat Bill, Jr – was not, in fact, depressed. He would later claim that the house scene was one of his "greatest thrills," before noting, "I was mad at the time, or I would never have done the thing."
Mad, indeed. Elsewhere, the same picture is not short on daredevilry: it was this film that would inspire much of Jackie Chan's Drunken Master school of buffoonery and would also kick-start the cartoon career of a certain iconic rodent: Mickey Mouse would make his screen debut in Steamboat Willie six months after Steamboat Bill, Jr's 1928 premiere.
The plot sees paddle steamer captain William Canfield (Ernest Torrence) reunite with the son (Keaton) he has not seen since infancy – a son, he is dismayed to discover, who is a dandified city slicker with a pencil moustache. Junior is ill-suited to the family trade and his clownish efforts could not come at a worse time: Canfield’s business rival James King (Tom McGuire) has just unveiled a new luxurious steamer. Romantic complications arise in the form Kitty King (Marion Byron), who can do little to hide her affection for William Jr.
We could harp endlessly on Keaton’s mastery of eye-rolls or the calculations he performed for the hurricane sequence, wherein he dangles from a 37 metre crane as a riverbank is destroyed. But we should not overlook the deft supporting performers, particularly the Scottish-born Torrence.
There is, too, something infectiously anarchic about the film’s representation of patriarchal authority. Both fathers are depicted dragging their adult offspring around by the hand, a spectacle that retains a weird, hilarious potency almost 90 years on.
