Almost twenty years later, Buster Keaton is still a saphead—except on a steamboat he endangers only river traffic, not the stock market. Still, he remains phenomenally out-of-place (that mustache is not so much a nod to Chaplin as it is a sideways exclamation point)—and so determined that only love can prevent total catastrophe—although one could argue that love is as much to blame as his own foppishness. I leave such rumination to the unmarried and the unwise; let us lay all blame not on the lady but Keaton’s hard and empty head.
The only act of Nature the film could produce to match Keaton’s epic fool is a hurricane—not the first time strong winds have buffeted screen clowns, but here alarmingly convincing; and Keaton is all but bested—
all but to be sure, since not even the strongest wind blows hard enough to topple the Stone Face. He’s the third little pig’s house, impenetrable—but somehow innocent of the necessary hubris one would assume necessary to stand up to hurricanes—or wolves. (That brick-house pig always seemed a bit smug to me.) No, Keaton remains simply
there, more stoic than stern, his true-love passions final as a driven spike, firm and matter-of-fact. I admire his temerity—but more so his solemn eyes, staring down all foes like a midday sun—not bright, though: simply unwavering, cloudless and clear. Even at the moment when the house falls upon him—reminding me of the Lumières
Démolition d'un mur—except without the magic rescue of the film being run backwards—Keaton is spared merely by an open window and his own immobility. A hero for the slight and the slender—with iron in reserve, as anemic as he may at first seem.
(I glance at the mixed metaphors above, and wince. But Keaton is “metaphysical,” like a John Donne poem, the dominant conceit of his existence so contorted it twists like a (playful) snake in my hand. All I can do is spout contradictions at his elusive, rubber-reinforced frame.)
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