Rent Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)

Lloyd v Keaton. - Steamboat Bill, Jr. review by Steve

This Buster Keaton classic  is strikingly similar to Harold Lloyd's earlier The Kid Brother, but on a different scale. Keaton's location shoot is more striking and his sets and stunts more ambitious. I think Lloyd's film is funnier. Both play ingenues, though in their mid thirties. Harold makes a romcom. This is more of an action comedy.  

Buster is a bookish milksop brought up by his mother on the east coast. He leaves to work on his dad's ramshackle river boat, and falls in love with the daughter of the owner of a fleet of state of the art steamships. A situation desired by neither father. Love conquers all, but not until Buster has proven himself by saving everyone from drowning in a cyclone.  

The film is best known for its astonishing final 25 minutes when the town is ripped apart by the high wind and washed away in a great tide. Including the famous gag of the front panel of a frame house collapsing over a hapless Buster, saved by an open upstairs window. It was a stunt he had used before, but not as impressively.   

Credit to the scenery and props department, their work on the storm scene is phenomenal, and complements Keaton's extraordinary performance as the man fighting nature. It is a tour de force and one of the great passages in cinema. Just watching him walking into the wind is worth your ticket. And no one falls as well as Buster.