A Few Thoughts on Our Hospitality

*Spoilers.*

November 19, 1923—the day Our Hospitality was released. This is one of my favorites of Buster Keaton’s feature films. So many hilarious jokes and gag sequences, great acting from Buster, and those stunts! I’ve already posted a Top Five Gags and a Favorite Characters post for Willie McKay, so I’m going to riff on other thoughts on the movie today.

One of the things this film really demonstrates is how much talent Buster had for working at both a macro and a micro level. He could do wildly ambitious, complex things, and he could also wring gold from the simplest of concepts. This applies to many aspects of his films, including his comedy, his stunts, and his storytelling.

Throughout the film, both the simple and the complex are repeatedly entwined. The film opens with contextual flashbacks, setting up a tragic backstory for Willie that he’s too young to remember. This may seem like a lot for a slapstick comedy, but in truth, it’s a transparent Hatfields & McCoys sendup, so “feuding families” is the main thing we need to know. But once that’s established, so much of the story’s humor is founded on this one tiny wrinkle: the Canfields want to kill Willie, but their Southern hospitality prevents them from doing it while he’s a guest in their home. This leads us to all manner of gags, from Willie desperately outstaying his welcome to his dismay when Virginia’s sheet music is blown through the open door.

Another simple basis for gags is the train sequence. It’s easy to say, “Willie and Virginia take a long train ride, and everything goes wrong!” It’s plain and to the point. But we also have Buster creating a working replica of George Stephenson’s Rocket locomotive, which fits the 1830s setting, and once he’s got his train, he mines it for everything it’s worth. The General is one thing, but there’s a solid 10-15 minutes of train gags in this movie, and it’s not even about that!  If there’s something funny that can be done with the Rocket, you can be sure that Buster comes up with it. He finds humor in the driver, the carriages, the wood for the furnace, the tracks, the smoke, and more.

The waterfall scene is what the film is most famous for, deservedly so. It’s an incredible scene, featuring magnificent stunts from Buster and a manmade waterfall. I love the hell out of it—I love the whole movie, but this scene is its crowning achievement. At the same time, it’s also the climax of a long sequence of gags that begins with the simple premise of two people tied to different ends of the same rope. This is a classic Buster Keaton “chain of gags” sequence, where one humorous development keeps leading into another and another, although this one has plenty of action mixed in too. Just by introducing this rope, we get Willie’s iconic fourth-wall break when he realizes the Canfield son has fallen off the cliff and is going to yank him down with him. We get the train severing the rope, only for Willie’s end of it to get tangled up in one of the wheels. And yes, we get Willie tying himself to a log, which then starts drifting down the river, only to catch on something at the very brink of the waterfall, allowing him to swing out dramatically in front of it. Just masterful work!