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Movies Forum Index » Silent Movies Forum » Berkeley, CA: STEAMBOAT BILL, JR. (1928)...
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| Bruce Calvert... |
 Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2008 3:38 am |
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http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/film/FN17021
United Artists: 90 Years
Sunday, July 6, 2008
5:00 p.m. Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Charles F. Reisner (U.S., 1928)
Judith Rosenberg on Piano
The charming Mississippi River setting (actually filmed along the
Sacramento Delta) is but one of Steamboat Bill, Jr.’s many pleasures.
The film seems to have a direct line to Buster Keaton’s youth and soul
in the tale of a sensitive, effeminate lad trying to figure out the
mettle of manhood in his overbearing dad. Buster with an umbrella
against the fearsome storm that rips the houses off people’s lives;
Buster drawn, as if in a dream, to an abandoned vaudeville theater:
“Keaton’s most entertaining balance of the instinctual and the
cerebral” (Andrew Sarris and Tom Allen, Village Voice). The climax is
one of Keaton’s most dangerous and carefully planned stunts: a wall
comes crashing down on him but he passes, untouched, through an open
window. Keaton was the true he-man among matinee idols—the scene was
done unfaked, with a real wall.
—Judy Bloch
• Written by Carl Harbaugh. Photographed by J. Devereux Jennings, Bert
Haines. With Keaton, Ernest Torrence, Marion Byron, Tom Lewis. (70
mins, Silent, B&W, 35mm, From Douris UK Ltd.)
Bruce Calvert
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