"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Monday, February 1, 2016

The Frozen North (1922)

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

Some over-the-top violence (including melodramatic killing,) rough treatment of women, and general unscrupulousness.

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