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If the Hatfields and McCoys rivalry doesn’t sound like ripe ground for comedic possibilities then you clearly aren’t Buster Keaton. The great stone faced comedian who met every challenge with remarked indifference and performed death-defying stunts with no emotional investment. Our Hospitality may not be the greatest of Keaton’s film, but its unique in that it allows us a look at an artist figuring out how to navigate the world of feature-length productions.
It’s an embryonic glimpse of the genius and visual poetry that would flow out of him a few years later. The opening prologue is pure melodrama of the silent period. Our hero’s father and his main rival engage in a pistol duel, his father dies, and his mother freaks and relocates to New York where he grows up blissfully unaware of the long-standing blood feud.
Flash forward and now our hero is twenty-one and on a return journey to reclaim the family estate. And the film is divided into, roughly, four chunks. The prologue, the train journey back, a dinner date that goes wrong and a madcap chase filled with Keaton’s typically crazy stunts. Each of these segments, minus the prologue, feels too long and bloated, and like the film would have been better suited to an exceptionally amazing short. What we have is an almost great movie that has scenes and reoccurring jokes which go on for a bit too long.
The train journey in particular seems to go on and on and on. It’s cute and charming at first, but I was ready for it to reach the station so we could move on to something else. Naturally, he meets and falls in love with a girl along the train journey, and she turns out to be the daughter of his family’s sworn enemy. Hatfields and McCoys reimagined as a Romeo and Juliet stand-in, it’s not terribly original, but Keaton does get in a few good dings along the way. He knows that as long as he’s a guest in their home, as southern gentlemen, they’ll be incapable of harming him the entire time he stays, so he keeps finding more outrageous and elaborate reasons to prolong his stay.
The climax is a never-ending chase which comes to a head with Keaton dangling over a waterfall on a tiny branch, fighting off the white rapids and reaching shore for his happily ever after. It’s exhilarating and still awe-inspiring despite 90 years separating it from us and the time of its creation. It is arguably one of the indelible images and greatest moments in all of cinema.
In Our Hospitality, Keaton hasn’t quite figured out how to manage the stunt work and plotting of an extended running time in this film, but all of his hallmarks are there. In a short period of time he’d go on to give us Sherlock, Jr. and The General, so Hospitality’s narrative shortcomings are more than forgiven since this is a glimpse of an artist figuring out the balancing act of a medium he’d go on to master.
