The
first few times I watched this Buster Keaton short, it didn’t do anything for
me. Not a thing. There seemed to be very little story, I didn’t
take much notice of the gags, and most of all, I noticed that Buster was acting
uncharacteristically “bad” and I didn’t really care for it. What unlocked The Frozen North for me was learning that it’s actually a parody of
the melodramatic westerns of silent star William S. Hart; that made all the
difference. I’m not even sure why exactly, since I’ve still never seen
any of Hart’s films, but now that I know the intention behind it, I can see
this short for how hilarious it really is.
(A few spoilers.)
Buster
is a bad man, a lawless rogue living in an unforgiving Alaska landscape. He’s all about what he wants, whether that’s
another man’s money or another man’s wife, and he’s not particularly choosy
about how he gets it. He’s rough,
commanding, and hard-(cola)-drinking, and he’s ready for life to bend to his
will.
From my
understanding, William S. Hart made a career out of playing rough ‘n’ tumble
cowboy types with dubious morals but a sensitive side (Buster parodies his
famous penchant for glycerin-tear crying scenes) – an early example of the “bad
boy” antihero, maybe? Buster’s version
of the character is definitely bad, even awful.
He tries to rob a bunch of gamblers at gunpoint (sort of,) he shoots two
people in cold blood, and when he takes a shine to someone else’s wife, his
version of wooing her looks a lot closer to how Big Joe Roberts treats the girl
when he plays one of Buster’s villains.
This, I think, is the first part of the parody, unromanticizing the
bad-boy swagger and making it clear that this guy is just a straight-up jerk.
Then,
you get the double whammy of Buster being both kind of hapless at ne’er-do-welling
and ridiculously cavalier about the consequences of his actions. Those people he tries to rob realize he’s no
threat when they see he’s using a picture from a wanted poster to hold them up,
and immediately after he shoots his apparently-cheating wife and her lover in a
fit of passion, he discovers he’s walked into the wrong house and it wasn’t his
wife at all. The latter is a perfect
example of what’s going on here; not only has he completely bungled things, but
he doesn’t care in the slightest that he’s just killed two people by
mistake. That callously dismissive air
allows for some really black comedy
that you don’t usually see in Buster’s work, but it’s very funny in a dark
way. I also love when Buster, trying to
keep a visiting police officer from seeing that his wife is unconscious (not by Buster’s hand, I should point
out,) puts on some music and pretends to dance with her, then unceremoniously
drops her back on the floor as soon as the officer leaves.
Just
setting a “western” in Alaska provides good opportunities for fun gags, and
Buster makes the most of his locale.
There’s a fetchingly-decorated igloo, a fantastic dueling ice-fishermen
scene, snowball-and-snowshoe baseball, off-the-cuff snowman disguises, fun with
motorized sleds, and, my personal favorite, acoustic guitar snowshoes. No one did it quite like Buster.
Warnings
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