Top Five Gags: Go West

*Spoilers*

November 1, 1925—the day Go West was released. Strictly speaking, probably a mid-range Buster Keaton feature (I mean, anything rankable has a mid-range by definition, right?), but it’s tons of fun. Brown Eyes is a topnotch leading lady, and there are some terrific bits here. These are my favorites!

 

Train Barrels

“Buster vs. object(s) vs. gravity” is a time-honored gag format, and this one is great! While riding the rails, Friendless gets on the wrong side of some stacks of barrels. I love how he flails like he’s drowning in a ball pit, we get some perfectly-timed wrestling with one barrel then another, and the coup de grâce comes at the end of the sequence: just after Friendless climbs inside one of the barrels for safekeeping, that’s when the door to the train car slides open and the barrels begin rolling out.

 

Milking the Cow

Probably my biggest laughs of the whole movie come from this scene, which is so simple but so hilarious. Tasked with milking a cow, Friendless sets the milk bucket beneath the cow, takes a seat in front of her…and waits. His alternating patience and confusion cracks me up every damn time. I adore the way he picks up the bucket and shows it to her, just in case she missed it, and it kills me that he gets up and sets the stool behind her in case she wants to sit down. Buster could do such amazing things with his stunts and his machines, but he could also mine absolute gold out of doing so little.

 

Branding Brown Eyes

Classic Buster Keaton problem-solving! By this point, Friendless has bonded with Brown Eyes the cow, and he’s troubled by the rough, violent sight of the cattle being branded. So when he’s told to do the same to her, he takes her aside and carefully shaves the branding symbol onto her flank. The whole scene is a delight, but the little touches make it sing even more, like when he uses some of her milk to mix up the shaving cream.

 

Los Angeles Cattle Rustling

It might be unfair to look at something so all encompassing, since Friendless trying to herd the cattle from downtown LA to the stockyards is the entire third act of the film. But I’d have a hard time picking out one or more individual bits from the sequence, so we’re putting it all together. Anything involving Friendless trying to rustle cattle out of a store is super fun, and I love the gag of all the people fleeing out of the Turkish bathhouse.

 

Red Devil Toreador

And of course, we have the clincher! Having already learned that waving red material attracts the cattle, Friendless rents a red devil costume, intending to lead the cattle calmly to the stockyards but accidentally kicking off a stampede. I just love it any time someone is following/tailing/chasing Buster and he moves from a loping walk to a fast walk to a nervous trot to a full-pelt run—he always does it magnificently, and it’s so silly that the someones chasing him this time are a herd of cattle!

Relationship Spotlight: Friendless & Brown Eyes (Go West)

Brown Eyes has the distinction of being the first animal to be featured on the blog.  She even beat out talking animals like Dug from Up!  She deserves it, because she’s fab.  At its heart, Go West is about the friendship between a boy and his cow, and maybe that’s a little sappy, but both characters sell it with everything they’ve got.

From their Aesop’s fable-esque introduction – Friendless removes a rock from Brown Eyes’ hoof (grammatical errors be damned, I’m going to use the plural possessive form for both, just because “Brown Eyes’s” and “Friendless’s” looks so weird) – these two are thick as thieves.  After failing to win over any of the other cowboys and having no luck with the horses, the mule, or the other cattle, Friendless’ rapport with Brown Eyes is so easy and natural.  I love that, once he removes the rock, he tips his hat to her, and I like how she just falls in line behind him and he doesn’t even realize it at first.

Much of the story centers around Friendless’ various attempts to help Brown Eyes.  There’s of course the big one, his fierce determination to save her from the stockyards, but it’s little things, too.  He sits up at night to keep watch against coyotes, he helps her stand up to the bullying steers (hint:  it involves a rack of antlers and a getup similar to Max in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and it’s fantastic!), and when he hears her mooing in distress, he gets a full-on Dashing Hero Run to come to her rescue.  In that last instance, it’s to protect her from being branded, and after unsuccessfully trying to hide her, he comes up with one of his cleverest ideas in the movie – shaving a “brand” onto her flank with his razor and shaving cream.

I like that a lot of these are smaller matters, because it feels more like a legitimate friendship that way.  Friendless doesn’t just want to keep Brown Eyes from getting slaughtered – he wants to keep her from getting scared or picked on or hurt, too.  And with the steers, he does more than give her the means to fight back.  We’re not privy to what he says, but we see him giving her a mini pep talk, no doubt encouraging her to get back out there and prove that the others can’t push her around.  So, in addition to swooping in to help her, he helps her to help herself.

So what’s Brown Eyes’ part in all of this?  Is it all give-give-give on Friendless’ side without anything in return?  Well, it’s not as pronounced, but she’s no slouch, either.  Again, we get the big instance of her protecting him from a charging steer when he’s unable to run away.  More than that, though, she befriends him.  In case you haven’t gathered it from his name, Friendless isn’t exactly flush with chums.  The other cowboys try to mess with him and push him around, and, seeming to realize that getting on their good side is an uphill battle, he doesn’t really bother.  In the running gag where Friendless is always too late for meals, arriving just as the food runs out and everyone gets up from the table, his victory isn’t to make it on time to join the rest of the ranch hands.  It’s to get there before everyone and be finished eating by the time they arrive.

In other words, he’s on his own a lot, and Brown Eyes’ devotion to him is probably a big part of why he cares about her so much.  She follows him around the ranch, keeping at his heels like a faithful dog.  I imagine that simply having someone who seems to appreciate him and want to be around him isn’t a luxury Friendless often gets, and he hangs onto that companionability when he finds it, even from non-humans.

Go West (1925)

 

The latest Buster Keaton movie to be featured on the blog is a rather unusual film for Buster.  Yes, he’s playing his fumbling-but-resourceful little fellow, the film is wildly inventive, and there are some remarkable gags.  So what’s different?  Two words:  Brown Eyes.

 

Brown Eyes is the name of Buster’s costar in this film, one of the first bovine actresses in Hollywood to receive a salary and a screen credit.  That’s right – Brown Eyes is a cow.  Following Horace Greeley’s advice to “go west, young man,” Buster’s character (a hapless chap called Friendless) rides the rails to a ranch where he gets a job as a rather dubious cowboy and makes a fast friend in the form of a certain brown-eyed beauty.  Unfortunately, Brown Eyes’s milk-giving days are behind her, and it’s up to Friendless to save her from the slaughterhouse.

 

For whatever reason, movie-going human beings are inherently more sympathetic to imperiled animals than imperiled people, and so, Go West is infused with a sentimental streak not usually found in Buster’s work.  Some would say that the heartstring-tugging present here feels like Chaplin rather than Buster, but while I agree it’s bit sappier than Buster’s typical fare, it doesn’t feel hugely out of place to me.  His stories aren’t big on sentiment, but some of his characters are, especially when it comes to the girl.  In this case, the girl just happens to be a cow; though the looks he gives Brown Eyes aren’t the lovesick gazes he points at the girls in his movies, they’re every bit as (platonically) affectionate.  On paper, it may actually be funnier to think of Buster running pell-mell and bending over backwards to save the cow he cares for, but in the execution, one can’t help feeling for Brown Eyes.  Watching Friendless’s efforts to rescue her, an “aw” may even escape one’s lips.

 

But enough about that – let’s move on to the comedy.  Buster must’ve had a ball playing around with the Wild West genre, because there are great gags aplenty.  Watching non-country boy Friendless trying to figure out how to milk a cow is hysterical, and everyone should see Buster Keaton struggling with a lasso at least once in their lives.  There’s some nice train humor, a winking reference to Buster’s famous stone face, and of course some clever, fantastically funny problem-solving on display.  I’m especially fond of the way Friendless retrieves his tiny gun from his full-sized holster, as well as his quick fix to spare Brown Eyes from being branded.

 

I mentioned Buster’s stone face, but something that’s really impressed me as I’ve been rewatching these movies is how deceptively expressive he is.  While it’s easy to focus on the deadpan, it’s always clear what his characters are thinking, thanks to subtle shifts in Buster’s facial expression and smart camera work that knows when to highlight it.  With hardly a flicker of movement, he can show surprise, fear, despair, resolve, joy, and a bevy of other emotions.  Just another reason to applaud this terrific filmmaker.

 

Warnings

 

Just lots of slapstick violence.