Top Five Gags: The Frozen North

*Spoilers.*

August 28, 1922—the day The Frozen North was released. This can be a hard one to take the first time you see it. Buster is parodying William S. Hart, an actor whose films I’ve never seen, doing his take on a cruel rake who causes trouble amid a little shameless melodrama (those thick glycerin tears!) As such, it’s very different from Buster’s normal work and features a very different sort of character for him. But even while parodying someone’s else’s shtick, Buster’s personality still comes through in a number of gags.

 

The Stickup

Buster wants to hold up a saloon, but he’s fresh out of ammo. Instead, he finds a poster of a gun-wielding masked outlaw and cuts out the figure, propping it up in the window of the saloon. Then, while his cardboard “partner” keeps his gun trained on everyone, Buster heads inside to collect the loot. It goes well for him… until someone with a little liquid courage tries to knock the gun out of the outlaw’s hand and realizes it’s just a cutout.

 

Fooling the Police

This is a character where casual sexism is part of the point—it’s baked into Hart’s film persona, and so Buster spends the short being pretty callous to women and treating them entirely on his terms. In this scene, his wife has gotten knocked out (he didn’t hit her, by the way, a vase fell on her head,) and the lawman has come a-calling. Thinking quick, Buster turns on the record player and picks up the unconscious wife, dancing her around the room so the officer thinks there’s nothing afoot. And just to hammer the point home, Buster dismissively drops her back on the floor as soon as the lawman leaves.

 

Walking Through the Snow

Buster has spotted another beautiful lady he’s got his eye on (like I said, sexist,) so he puts on a crisp white suit, grabs a stylish cane, and sets out to meet her. However, as he trudges through the deep snow, he doesn’t quite cut the suave figure he was hoping for here. Great bit of physical comedy.

 

Snowshoeing

More “walking around in the snow”-based humor. Buster doesn’t have snowshoes, but he does have two guitars. This is a terrific sight gag, and the way Buster clomps through the snow with his feet shoved into guitars is simply *chef’s kiss*.

 

Ice Fishing

While ice fishing, Buster accidentally hooks the line of the guy fishing the hole behind him. This is superbly executed, their poles alternately rising and lowering as each man wrestles with the “big catch” he thinks he has on the line. When Buster proves the victor, giving his line a final heave, the other man is yanked into his hole in the ice, and Buster has to fish him out. Impeccable timing, and fantastic to watch.

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.