Steamboat Bill Jr Analysis
By Trevor Valescu | February 18, 2017
Steamboat Bill Jr. Silent Film Analysis
Steamboat Bill Jr. is Buster Keaton’s final independent film, though not necessarily the last one in which he had creative control. His first work with MGM, The Cameraman, could be said to hold that title, so when you watch Steamboat Bill Jr. there is not the same sense of the bittersweet you may get when watching Keaton’s final 1928 masterpiece. However, there is something grand about Steamboat Bill Jr., not just in its dazzling final hurricane sequence, tight sense of plotting and structure, or Buster’s increasingly creative pratfalls, but in the emotional heart of the story, young Willie Canfield’s efforts to simultaneously please his father Bill Sr. (Ernest Torrance) and be with his college girlfriend, Kitty (Marion Byron)— a hard task, considering her father and his are rivals in the river boat transportation business.
It is true that Keaton’s films often show his characters more comfortable with props and animals than other people; this is perhaps the largest reason why his characters feel otherworldly, as though he hailed from another dimension altogether and were perplexed by ordinary human interaction. Perhaps more than any of Keaton’s previous films, Steamboat Bill Jr. has Keaton interacting with other characters constantly, and they are some of the most interesting supporting characters in his oeuvre.
Keaton’s feature characters don’t often have families. With the exceptions of the aunt in Our Hospitality who warns him of the feud, the parents in Battling Butler who push him to “rough it” in the wilderness in order to become less dependent on luxury, and the doting mother in College (played by 1910s comedienne Florence Turner, no less!), most Keaton protagonists are loners looking for a place to call home or at least someone to share home with (often a love interest, sometimes a cow). Yet in Steamboat Bill Jr. unlike any other Keaton movie, the protagonist’s family is a source of conflict. In Keaton’s short work, Torrance may have been purely the heavy with his scowling face and towering build, but here that function is complicated: he is the bullying heavy, but he is also Willie’s perplexed father. Willie’s petite frame, stylish clothes, and enthusiastic ukulele-playing have the burly Bill fearing his son may be a wimp at best or a touch “purple under the collar” at worst. And while Willie’s relationship with Kitty may dispel the latter anxiety, his prime desire is to make Willie more of what he thinks a man ought to be. Being a son who wants to please the father he’s never known, Willie agrees to go along with it. Irritated with his son’s college boy aesthetic, Bill Sr. takes Willie to the hat shop to try on a series of comically oversized hats. Of course, the scene is funny, what with the silly headwear and Buster’s attempts to look as dignified as possible in them, but the scene is hardly frivolous or throwaway. It serves an important narrative function: the main conflict of the film is father versus son, or perhaps more specifically, the father wanting to fashion his son into his own image. Yet the moment Bill Sr. is satisfied with a hat and the two Canfields leave the shop, the headwear is blown off of Willie’s head the moment they leave the shop. Already, we are shown through the visuals that Bill’s mission is a doomed one; Willie cannot be changed and, as we come to learn later, should not be.
And yet despite Bill’s distaste for his son being who he is, he is not presented as a terrible person or black-hatted villain. Indeed, Bill is protective of his son, knocking out any sailor who attempts to bully or beat up on Willie. And once his violent temper lands him in prison, he gains a newfound respect for his effete son’s resourcefulness in the hilarious and celebrated tools-in-bread sequence. Like Annabelle Lee in The General who so wanted Johnnie Gray to be a soldier, Bill Sr. discovers that there was nothing wrong with his son after all, he never needed to change himself to prove heroic. (Throughout the picture, Keaton and Torrance have such wonderful chemistry in general; it’s too bad they never shared the screen again. It could have livened up some of the dreadful projects MGM had in store for Keaton in the early 1930s.)
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Past Election Thoughts
By Trevor Valescu | February 6, 2017
Hillary is finished at this point in the race. To expand on this point I’ll bring up what most of us who have been paying attention know about our dear Killary. Firstly, she is an outright liar and failure of a politician. Not only has she never fixed any of the intercities that she was re-elected time and time again to fix, but she also let four good Americans die on her Mission of Death and Destruction across the Middle East. Now i’m no fan of the backwater Middle Eastern world, but the policies of Regime change are not helping anybody but the terrorist that pop up from the chaos. Secondly, continuing on the lying and leaving out information bit, she left everyone in the dark about her deteriorating medical condition for weeks up till yesterday when her problems were brought to light by her seizure and cease of motor function. They literally had to chuck her into the disabled van, (pretty funny how a perfectly healthy individual needs to ride in a van meant for people with disabilities), and hauled her off to her daughter’s apartment,not a hospital, so she could get better. Then we learn she has pneumonia and has had it since Friday, but failed to mention it to anyone.
Since she was surrounded by people with this illness you’d think she would be considerate to not spread it around to others, but she willingly exposes it to her daughter and her grandchild. That makes you think ‘Wow this woman really is a crazy coot,’ but in fact she doesn’t have that kind of pneumonia. She shows signs of Aspiration Pneumonia (rather than viral or bacterial) and dissuades the worry of infecting people. This means her throat muscles are not working properly, (hence the continuous coughing and clearing of the throat), and that she most likely has Parkinson’s since its a classic symptom of the disease. She is literally in her death throes and neglected to tell anyone so she could right it off as ‘overheating’ in 70-80 degree weather. This changes the game of the race tremendously. I can’t tell you how stupid this is to hide from the general public. You’ve pretty much lost this one Hillary. Finally, and i’m sorry for the length but I want to wrap this up nicely, she alienated half of the voter base this week by calling Trump’s supporters “A Basket of Deplorables.” Now she said half of us, but it doesn’t matter because when you become president you are at the whims of ALL the people and are expected to work for ALL the people of this great nation. I personally think its rather funny to see her destroy her chances of getting elected this way because now we have yet another nickname we can all laugh at and proudly display to all who call us such. Hate to say it Hillary, but you’re fired.
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