Our Hospitality
(Buster Keaton & John G. Blystone, 1923)
Prologue: on a rain-soaked thundery night somewhere in the Appalachians in the year of 1810, a new chapter is set to be written in the ongoing mortal feud between the McKays and the Canfields. One of the Canfield brothers, drunk with aggression, trespasses onto the McKay estate intending to shoot the head of their clan, to the horror of his wife and their uncomprehending baby son. So far, this sounds more like a dramatic western and not too much like a Buster Keaton comedy. Or perhaps there is something darkly comic in what happens next in the showdown: each man shoots the other and both die.
But perhaps this is the point: Buster could do it all, including a tense shootout in the opening minutes, where a perfectly timed thunderstorm leads to a black-out just as the two rivals gun each other down. The effect of lightning pistol-shots in the darkness shows how aware of the visual potential of film Buster was, of how the rhythm between light and darkness can be used to create dramatic spectacle, in what was only his second feature as co-director.
Cut to 20 years later, and that McKay baby has grown into a young man named Willie McKay, played by none other than the Great Stoneface himself. Having been raised by his aunt on the more genteel East Coast, he knows nothing of this covenant of blood tying his clan to the Canfields in self-perpetuating violence. Soon, that, and Willie’s world, will change. But first, Keaton has time for a few visual gags, showing us his lack of nostalgia about the past. Every chance he gets, Buster pokes fun at the old-time ways. Before the bicycle, there was the rather ridiculous ‘dandy horse’, which is ridden on two wheels and propelled by the rider’s feet on the ground without any pedalling:
When Willie receives a letter that he is the inheritor of the McKay estate and has to take a train to re-visit his Appalachian roots for the first time in his adult life, Willie sits not in a mighty ‘Iron Horse’, that harbinger of ‘civilisation’ to the wild west in the 19th century, but rather in a comical machine so slow that Willie’s dog manages to run alongside it the whole way…
It is interesting to think that the movie’s setting is about a century in the past from when it was made. What did that past signify to an American audience in 1923? For John Ford, who one year later would make The Iron Horse (1924), his mythmaking western about the construction of the cross-country railroad, and for the western genre in general, 19th century USA was a canvas on which to create national legends, origin stories that Americans could feel proud of — and which of course erased the extermination of the native populations.
I am not saying that Buster Keaton is in any way a political filmmaker here. But one reason his films still feel modern is he has no time for pompousness or bloated self-importance in shaping narratives about the past. His first feature as co-director, Three Ages, made earlier in 1923, was a parody skewering D.W. Griffith’s epic of inter-generational injustice Intolerance. Where Griffith’s period film was moralising, pompous and often maudlin, Keaton irreverently sent that up and employed the past in the service of his only dictate: the visual gag.
Back in Our Hospitality, when Willie finally makes it to the town of his ancestors, as the sole heir of the McKay estate, Buster perfectly visualises how his dreams of what he is to inherit go up in smoke in the face of a more ugly reality:
And not only that, but Willie too now runs the risk of going up in smoke. Aboard that slow-coach train, he has fallen in love with the Canfield daughter and is invited to her house… where the Canfield men are confronted with a perplexing dilemma. They want nothing more than to put this last McKay into the ground, as their family honour decrees. Yet at the same time, their Old South values prevent them from harming anyone while he is their guest. So they must wait for Willie to step outside before they can shoot this sworn enemy down. Cue much hilarity when Buster, an unwitting and unwilling cowboy who only wants to save his hide, clocks that he must at all costs remain in the Canfield household to stay alive.
It is tempting to call Our Hospitality a revisionist western before such a thing could even exist. There is nothing honorable about this ‘wild west’. The film satirises the sheer hypocrisy of these traditional rules, on the one hand binding you to kill for honour, while pulling you towards fake hospitality to preserve face value on the other. Nor do we see any fast-shooting gunslingers here. The lengthy time it takes these men of 1830 to reload their pistols further serves to bring them down a peg or two, and is often used to add to the narrative shenanigans.
Our Hospitality is so many things at once. An array of visual gags (some of which Buster would re-work to even greater comic effect, such as the train sequences). An unsentimental satire which still also manages to be a love story, and to film some of the lyrical beauty (shot in Oregon and California) which stands in as that 19th century USA ‘untamed’ nature. If that’s not enough there’s a wild climax in which Buster (who always did his own stunts) performs a rescue over a waterfall over some river rapids. It’s even a family album of sorts, with Buster’s father, his wife, and his son all featuring too. The motion picture in 1923 could be anything and Buster harnessed that potential in ways which still inspire 100 years on.
Cinescope 