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!

Top Five Gags (Our Hospitality)

It was hard picking a Top Five for Our Hospitality, because it doesn’t just have great gags – it has great gag sequences, long stretches of the film with nonstop killer comedy or terrific recurring bits that crop up throughout.  In the end, here’s what I came up with.

The Great Train Ride

Honestly, I could have made a Top Five just of train gags in this movie.  I love everything about the train ride so much.  The whole thing is fantastic, but if I had to pick one bit – okay, two – it would be the scenes where the engine variously winds up behind the rest of the cars (don’t ask) and tooling down the untracked dirt road.  The guy on the back car blowing his horn at the engineer and pointing to the front like, “You’re supposed to be up there, dummy!” just kills me.

Old-Timey Pistols

This film has a lot of fun playing with the early-19^th-century setting (the train sequence is packed with these jokes,) and I just love the running gag of how long it takes the brothers to reload their pistols.  The first time, Willie winds up saving himself accidentally by “helpfully” firing the round in one brother’s jammed gun, but he later uses it to his advantage, pinching a gun and firing it to buy himself a little time.

An Awkward Dinner

Willie’s just realized he’s trapped in a house with a family that wants him dead, and he has to sitting down to dinner with them.  All the men keeping tabs on each other while the parson says grace is way too funny, and Willie’s all-around jumpiness – especially when Mr. Canfield starts vigorously sharpening his knife to carve the roast – is great, too.

Permanent Houseguest

Willie’s initial attempts to keep from leaving (including missing-hat lies and lame dog tricks) are funny enough, but his efforts to stay in the house, and so stay safe by the hospitality code that prevents the Canfields from killing him while he’s under their roof, are even better the next day.  His expression when his girl’s sheet music blows out the patio door onto the lawn is priceless, and I like his sneaky way to secure himself a bit of alone time with her.

End of His Rope

Naturally, there’s plenty of humor to be mined from two men tied together with a long rope, one of whom wants to kill the other.  Put them on a high rocky outcrop over water, though, and it’s amazing.  Absolutely best moment of this scene is when Buster sees the brother go sailing past him over the edge, and he just braces himself against the rocks and gives the most panicked-yet-deadpan look to the camera.  Perfect.

Favorite Characters: Willie McKay (Our Hospitality)

I’ve come to realize that Our Hospitality is one of my absolute favorite Buster Keaton films, and Willie has a lot to do with that.  He has a strong dose of Buster’s usual “little fellow” in him, but he’s also a bit more of an actual leading man type, which makes for an interesting blend.

The only son of the late John McKay, city boy Willie returns to the South when he comes of age and inherits his father’s house.  Evidently one to get down to business, he manages to 1) fall in love, 2) unknowingly rekindle an age-old feud with his girl’s family, 3) evade numerous murder attempts from her dad and brothers, and 4) be the Bustery version of a licensed badass, all in about 48 hours.  Apparently, though, he doesn’t learn the last name of the new love of his life until he comes to her house for supper and basically finds himself trapped in a pit of gun-wielding vipers.  There’s always something, I guess.

There are plenty of ways in which Willie fits Buster’s standard character.  Naturally, he’s prone to getting into increasingly huge scrapes, and disaster follows him as closely as his faithful dog.  He has that particular Buster energy, with the slight but super obvious facial reactions, the odd mixture of awkwardness and boldness, and the funny little “don’t mind me – just going for a stroll” walk he does when he’s in trouble and is trying to nonchalantly bluff his way out of it.  However, Willie might also be the most atypical character Buster plays in his silent features.  While Willie was raised in New York in ignorance of the feud, he’s not a dandy a la The Navigator or Battling Butler, and of the copious laughs in the film, only a few are derived from Willie not knowing the ways of the South.  And Willie may be disaster-prone, but it’s not so much that he causes disasters; more so, he just tends to attract them.  Buster’s characters often start out well-meaning but clumsy and hapless, and they grow into their more heroic qualities (complete with the graceful athleticism) over the course of the film.  Bad things happen to them, but they usually bungle a lot on their own, too.

Willie really isn’t clumsy, and he’s not all that hapless, either.  He has his moments here and there – I get such a kick out of him trying in vain to put on his top hat in the low-ceilinged train car, and his fishing adventure doesn’t exactly go over as planned – but in general, he has it pretty together.  Once he realizes that he’s blundered into the Canfield home and figures out the loophole that they can’t hurt him inside the house, he comes up with an endless supply of smart ways to keep himself safe.  And later, as he’s trying to get away, he has some major obstacles to deal with and handles himself like a Buster boss.  That waterfall scene is just incredible.

I wonder if it makes a difference that Willie doesn’t have a romantic rival in this movie.  Usually, Buster and a taller/richer/smoother/more square-jawed guy are vying for the affections of the same girl, and although Buster always proves that he won’t go down without a fight, the other guy is stereotypically better on paper, and his function is in part to try and undermine Buster in front of the girl.  Willie doesn’t have to put up with any of that.  Virginia is into him from the start, and the only thing standing in their way is the fact that her dad and brothers are trying to kill him.  Obviously, if we had to choose between which hurdle we’d rather face, it wouldn’t be the latter, but from a character standpoint, it lets Willie to be a little more competent and debonair throughout instead of building up to it.  So, he’s a bit closer to a romantic hero type, but at the same time, he’s also so Buster.  It’s a fun combination, and I really love it.