Call shenanigans on me as a movie-buff, but I've never fully completed watching a Buster Keaton film (I've seen most of the General, but not enough to give a fair estimate). What luck then to find Steamboat Bill Jr in a 1 dollar bin, because Keaton does indeed live up to the hype! Although it's still on my mind to say that Chaplin is the genius of silent comedy, Keaton's wit in the staging of purely physical gags and even in the wording of the title cards is top-notch and is a standard to live up to for comedians today. It's got some things that are almost textbook in the realm of slapstick (he's standing right under a house about to fall on him, thank goodness for the window space!), but it's also very original in some other ways, if only in little details. I loved seeing the jail-house scene, where on sees the mood totally laid out- suspense in the guise of mishaps involving a huge loaf of bread loaded with tools to get Bill's father out of jail. The twists that happen involving the jailman, and the escape, are worth checking out the film alone.
Other little gags speak to how well Keaton could work gags big and small, be it riding a flying tree (!) to the water, or just trying to set up a plank to go to Stonewall Jackson's ship. There's even a sequence that I would show immediately to those wanting to get a sense of Keaton at his best, which actually involves as much reaction from those around him as Keaton himself, with the trying-on-the-hats sequence, where one is too small, or too big, or just too goofy. It almost goes way too over the top in the climax (how many things in town can Bill Jr go around in a tailspin, including winding up on what looks like a film set, ha!), but why carp? It's an exemplary form of showing a level of sophistication in doing dumb things, which includes sincerely dumb dialog ("Hey, my son's coming to visit, I haven't seen him since he was a baby" "I bet he's a grown lad now"). I'm sure the General will stay a Keaton classic for decades to come, but as far as purely accessible comedy on all levels Steamboat Bill Jr is hard to beat from the era.
