No País dos Gelados

The humour is uncharacteristically cynical for Keaton who cuts a wholly incongruous figure from the moment he emerges from a subway in the middle of Alaska.

A modern audience is unlikely to recognise his parodies of William S. Hart and Erich von Stroheim, but with London currently gasping through a heatwave all that snow sure looks good.

I can imagine André Breton, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Man Ray, Luis Buñuel, and Salvador Dali enjoying this Keaton short. A subway station in the frozen north, an attempted holdup of a gambling hall (a gag that only makes sense in the context of a film), the radiator of a sled overheating, golf clubs, a keep off the grass sign sticking up through the snow, etc.

The surrealist movement was influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and free association and his interpretation of dreams. Considering that The Surrealist Manifesto wasn't written until 1924, so it's very possible that this could have influenced the European surrealists.

I realize that this may seem like a lot of extra information, but having some knowledge of surrealism helps make this Keaton short more understandable and enjoyable. Even though this might seem disjointed, there is some logic behind all of this. If you don't believe me, just ask your analyst...

Though this film includes some nice gags and cartoonish action like all the rest Buster Keaton's films, but 'The Frozen North' is more notable for Buster playing a bad guy. At the beginning of the movie we see Buster emerge from Subay Exit in the middle of the snowy fields of Alaska. Then he proceeds to rob a gambling house, shooting a couple because he mistakes the woman to be his wife, and pursues to chase the beautiful married woman next door.

'The Frozen North' was meant to be mockery of western of that era, especially those of William S. Hart, very popular movie star who didn't like Keaton's take of his characters. Keaton also briefly parodies Erich von Stroheim's womanizing character from 'Foolish Wives'.

As this film is not the funniest or best work of Keaton, it's still fun enough to see. Especially if you are early silent cinema aficionado.

This is a somewhat odd Keaton short, and not all of it works that well, but it does contain some good material. It was written as a parody of some contemporary melodramas, and as such there are a lot of things that Buster's character does that would make more sense and/or would be funnier to someone familiar with the films that he was parodying. Nevertheless, it has some fine gags, with most of the best ones dealing with deliberate incongruities in the "Frozen North" setting. Keaton's imagination and creativity are evident in a lot of the details, even if the overall result is more uneven than usual.

I read recently that this was supposed to be a satire of someone else's movies (I can't remember the actor's name that Keaton is satirizing), but even knowing that, it's a shocker. The one thing you can always count on in Keaton's movies is an underlying sweet-naturedness (unlike Chaplin, who expresses a lot of anger in his comedies). I wish he hadn't made it, because by now, the movies he's referring to are forgotten, and we don't get the point. All his other movies are about universal human experiences, and will always be understood by any audience, anywhere.