Steamboat Bill Jr: The Prestige

With the face of an angel, the form of an acrobat, and the soul of a storyteller, Joseph Frank ‘Buster’ Keaton has left an indelible impression on the hearts of film buffs the world over.

But there’s more. As in: The Pledge. The Turn. The Prestige.

Magician Ricky Jay explains the above terms: “You’ve got to take the observer from the ordinary, to the extraordinary, to the astounding.”

And in Buster’s 1928 feature, Steamboat Bill Jr., here, he does just that, taking us on a magic ride, with himself as the magician. And Buster

Steamboat Bill Jr. is possibly my favorite Buster Keaton film, and in it, he is both at his most bumbling and most heroic.

Buster plays William Canfield Junior, with towering Ernest Torrence as his father, Steamboat Bill. Tom McGuire is J. J. King, Steamboat Bill’s not-so-friendly rival, and Marion ‘Peanuts’ Byron is King’s daughter. Steamboat Bill’s craft is named the Stonewall Jackson and has seen better days; King’s shiny sleek boat is named after him.

During the course of the film the kids fall for one another in Romeo and Juliet fashion, Bill Senior lands in jail, a cyclone lands, and Buster lands in the hospital.

This is how it plays out:

The Pledge: The magician shows something ordinary, like a dove. Junior is introduced as a college man in his ordinary, if booby-trapped, world. And he is not what Dad (who hasn’t seen Junior since he was a baby) expected to see, decked out in his beret, silly mustache, and ukulele. Yet, when a magician takes out his dove, the expectation of wonders are already present.

The Turn: The magician takes his ordinary dove, and makes it disappear. Here, Junior’s ordinary world of college life has vanished. In just one of many amusing sequences, Dad, hoping to make a tough boatmaster of him, tries to replace Junior’s effete beret. Maybe clothes really do make the man, because next, Kitty King decks Junior out in a snappy uniform, which, dashing though it may seem to us, makes him the object of derision. When Dad literally tries showing Junior the ropes (the way to operate the steamboat), Junior makes an utter mess of it, becoming entangled in every line, tripping the wrong levers, getting conked on the head…

…and then comes the cyclone.

The Prestige: The magician tops his dove’s disappearance, making it re-appear. But here, the dove needs quite a bit of coaxing. King, annoyed beyond human endurance by Junior’s cascade of faux pas, retaliates, condemning Dad’s steamboat and cutting off his livelihood. This leads to a mutual fist fight, which lands Dad in jail. In a hilarious, protracted bit of business, Junior tries to break Dad out of jail, delivering a loaf of bread with what seems to be an entire toolbox baked right in.

Junior succeeds in the jailbreak, but the river’s risin’ and the ground has turned to liquid. Through a series of mishaps, Dad gets tossed back into the pokey, and Junior ends up in the hospital, only becoming aware of the danger posed by the cyclone when the entire hospital is carried off by the wind.

Running disoriented through town, the cyclone giving him all it’s got, Junior passes through a theater, where all the backstage magic seems out to get him. Once he makes it outside, he takes a moment to rest and recover. But this brief respite culminates in Buster Keaton’s most famously hair-raising stunt—-a 4000-pound building facade comes crashing down on him, with an open window offering only a two-inch clearance.

Then, Junior sees Dad in trouble, as the jail itself tips into the river and is swept away in the ravening currents. Junior springs into action, leaping tall steamboats in a series of bounds, utterly mastering every element of its operation with lightning speed and ingenuity.

Junior saves not only Bill Senior, but Kitty, her father J. J. King, and even a clergyman floundering in the swollen river—so he can marry Kitty on the spot.

There it is: Buster the Magician, in a breathtaking turnaround, bends reality to his will, rescues EVERYONE—-and makes us laugh in the process.

The Prestige.

(Many thanks to Lea of https://silentology.wordpress.com/2021/03/22/the-seventh-annual-buster-keaton-blogathon/ for hosting this ‘Busterthon!)