Les lois de l'hospitalité

Although not Keaton's greatest film, this one has sure got some really great moments. The build-up is rather slow while the main plot is being established: 1830s Kentucky. Keaton gets invited by a pretty girl to attend her family dinner. What he doesn't realize until too late is that the family in question is his inherited mortal enemies in a blood feud that has been going on for centuries. The girl's father and brothers all want to kill him but is prevented from doing so until he has left their house (hence the title).

Our Hospitality has got some amazing action sequences but the tempo is very uneven. The early part of the film treats us to some beautiful replicas of old vehicles including trains and bicycles and also some of Keaton's usual train-rail comedy. The middle part, where Keaton guests his blood feud enemies is full of running in and out through doors. Up until now everything has been pretty slow. The last third of the movie though, is truly mind boggling! Keaton and a chasing gunman falls down cliffs, flows down rivers and waterfalls, jumps in and out of moving trains and so on while tied to each other with a rope around their waists. It must have been through watching this James Bond learned his action trade. Our Hospitality however, has also got a lot of comedy in its moments of unbelievable action.

Good fun.

Our Hospitality, Buster Keaton's second feature film, marks a great leap forward in his art. It's his first truly plot-driven film (his first feature, Three Ages, was deliberately made as three connected two-reelers, with only the loosest plot to hold the gags together.) It was also the first in which he banished any hint of cartoon-style slapstick and made gags take a back-seat to narrative. The slower pace and subtler comedy show Keaton's confidence that he didn't need to clown non-stop to retain the audience's interest. The grand scale and period authenticity look forward to his masterpiece, The General. Buster had always had a serious side, but this was the first time it dominated a film. Consequently, Our Hospitality is not his funniest work, but it has a unique sweetness and charm, rich with atmosphere and drama. The elegant historical setting and fresh outdoor scenery add to the handsome effect, and Buster's performance is particularly graceful and sensitive. Like the engineer he would portray in his best-known film, The General, his character here is a very polite, deceptively mild-mannered young man who can turn into a heroic athlete without even changing his clothes.

Our Hospitality was inspired by the Hatfield-McCoy feud, and the plot involves Buster, as a sheltered young man raised in New York, stumbling into a Southern blood feud when he returns to his ancestral home to claim an inheritance. The joke of the title is that once he enters the home of the rival family, they can't kill him without violating their code of hospitality—until he steps outside! The melodramatic prologue that opens the film comes as a surprise, but it effectively sets up the tension that runs through the story. It's not overplayed, and it includes a cute turn by Buster's infant son, playing the younger incarnation of his own character, Willie McKay. Grown to manhood in New York, Willie is a gentle, foppish type, introduced riding a ludicrous proto-bicycle (accurately based on historical prints of the Gentleman's Hobbyhorse, the first bicycle.) Informed that he has inherited his family's estate, he boards a train for the South.

Buster's main reason for setting the film in 1830 was so that he could indulge his passion for trains by creating a working model of Stephenson's "Rocket," the first locomotive. The train journey proceeds at a fluid, unhurried pace, blending a string of gags arising from obstacles encountered along the way (donkeys, crafty hillbillies, derailments) with a delicate development of romance between Willie and Virginia Canfield, the young woman sharing his coach. Virginia is played by Natalie Talmadge, Buster's wife at the time. She's pretty and appropriately demure, but it's easy to see why she didn't become a star like her sisters Norma and Constance. She looks nervous and insecure in front of the camera. In addition to featuring Buster's wife, son and father (the lanky, irascible train engineer), Our Hospitality was the swan-song of Big Joe Roberts, who played the "heavy" in almost all of Keaton's early films. Already ill during the making of this film (he died shortly after it was completed), he plays the aged, forgiving patriarch of the Canfield clan.

The sequence set in the Canfield mansion, where Virginia invites Willie to dinner (not knowing he is the last remnant of the rival McKay clan), is very funny, playing the murderous feud against a stately, antebellum gentility. I love the way all the men keep one eye open during the saying of grace; Willie's frantic efforts to avoid leaving the house; and his attempts to court Virginia while dealing with her gun-wielding brothers. Once he flees the house, the film shifts into high gear. The long chase, making full use of the rugged landscape, is exciting and contains much dashing stunt-work on Buster's part: his fall off a cliff while tied to another man, his ride through the river rapids (he almost drowned due to a mishap making this scene—and it's in the movie!), culminating in the famous waterfall climax. I don't want to give away exactly what happens: I'll never forget the thrill of seeing it for first time, unprepared. But even without the element of surprise, the beauty of this stunt, the pendulum arc he describes with his body, always takes my breath away.

One final note: contrary to what someone wrote elsewhere on this page, it was not "standard practice" for silent stars to do all their own stunts. Buster Keaton was unique in never using a double, and probably no star ever took greater risks or endured more physical suffering than he did in the interest of his art. But the supreme achievement is how effortless and understated his performances are; he's not showing off, just attending to the task at hand.

Keaton throughout his career did most all of his stunts and even suffered serious injury during the shooting of "The General". During a stunt with a watering tower, Keaton fell hard to the track and broke his neck, but did not know it until 13 years later. Also, during one of the final scenes in "Our Hospitality" when Keaton's character is floating down the river, his safety line broke and he almost drowned, but he was a stickler for not cutting until he said so, because he did not want to miss anything with the camera. Also, during the shooting, the love interest of Keatons character was his wife who was pregnant with their second child, and if you watch closely they attempt to hide her stomach on many occasions. Also, the child at the first that plays the baby Willie, is actually Buster Keaton Jr.

A parody of a real-life feud between two families in the 19th century, Buster Keaton's Our Hospitality may not be as memorable as Sherlock Jr. or The General but it nonetheless works as yet another accomplished piece of technical filmmaking from "The Great Stone Face" and packs in a few genuinely hilarious situations over the course of its runtime but there are also numerous stretches of nothingness in between that never lets it off the ground.

The story of Our Hospitality covers the feud between two families that has been ongoing for so long that no one remembers who or what started it in the first place. The plot follows a young man who, while en route to his hometown, meets a girl on the train and they soon become acquainted. Invited to supper at her place, he ultimately learns that she belongs to the rival family and he's going to be executed by her kins as soon as he departs, following which he keeps finding ways to not leave the house.

Directed by Buster Keaton, Our Hospitality is part serious family drama & part comedy and while both these elements are blended nicely, there are still a few overstretched dramatic moments in between that could've been further trimmed. The situation comedy however is expertly handled and Keaton's deadpan expressions only help in making it all the more effective. From a technical standpoint, there isn't really much to complain about as the set pieces, black-n-white photography & other elements are brilliantly executed.

On an overall scale, Our Hospitality once again presents Buster Keaton in control of his craft, but its desired effect does feel diminished by time. There are moments that make you wonder how Keaton pulled it off, like the famous waterfall rescue scene, but there is quite a bit of plodding to sit through if all you are looking for is some good old-fashioned laughs. I do appreciate the technical mastery presented here and its contribution to its genre cannot be downplayed but I did expect more from what this silent classic eventually had in store. Still, worth your time & money and a definite must for Keaton fanatics.

"Our Hospitality" is Buster Keaton's first proper feature film. He starred in the dreadful "The Saphead" (1920), but had no input behind the camera, and "Three Ages" (1923) is more of an anthology of three shorts in parody of D. W. Griffith's mammoth "Intolerance" (1916). Thus, this was the first time he had to fully work out how to adapt to the longer format. He had Charlie Chaplin's "The Kid" (1921) and Harold Lloyd's "Grandma's Boy" (1922), and Fatty Arbuckle had already begun on his short-lived feature career, too, to guide him on the insertion of dramatic elements and how to base the gags around the character development, as opposed to the more slapdash, slapstick arrangement of the shorts, as nonetheless hilarious as they could be.

The result would remain one of his best features, although I'm partial to the cinematically-reflexive "Sherlock Jr." (1924). It's aged terrifically well, including an all-time great waterfall climax, but the amusing irony of its historical value is that the film is now nearly 100 years old, made in 1923, and it's fascinated with and mocking of a world from nigh a century before it, of 1830. And, from riding a dandy horse to prefiguring his own "The General" (1927) in ridiculous fashion with a replica train of the so-called "Stephenson's Rocket," so chosen precisely for how ridiculous it looked, Keaton demonstrates his dedication to production values. A lot of comedic mileage is had here of this "iron monster" of the tracks, to boot. I especially love the gag of a man tossing rocks at the conductor so as to collect the firewood he throws back at him in retaliation.

Nominally, the burlesque here is of the Hatfield-McCoy feud that plays out like "Romeo and Juliet" in the Appalachian Mountains. This begins with a cold open played dramatically straight establishing the ongoing feud back in 1910. I'm intrigued by the suggestion made by several others that this opening is like a bad D. W. Griffith drama, especially considering Keaton was no stranger to parodying dramatic filmmakers, including the aforementioned "Three Ages" or his merciless takedown of William S. Hart Westerns and Erich von Stroheim melodramas in "The Frozen North" (1922). Some of this may be seen with the other silent clowns, as well, such as Chaplin's "A Burlesque on Carmen" (1915) being an imitation of Cecil B. DeMille's "Carmen" (1915), and Mack Sennett's Keystone basically got its start by making fun of Griffith's one-reel last-minute rescues of damsels in distress.

So, what if we extrapolate this insinuation that Keaton is imitating Griffith in the opening scene here. Note that Griffith, rather notoriously now, prided himself as a Southern--and what was once considered Western (Kentucky)--gentleman, son of a Confederate soldier. As a young man, he set out on his career by moving to New York City, which is where the movies were made at the time. This set him on a path of cinematically glamorizing his white Southern heritage with disastrous results (namely, resurrecting the Klan). Although he casts an African-American actor in the servant role, Keaton largely sidesteps any racial issues here, but he makes an utter mockery of Southern hospitality, as he comically exploits the Canfields' honor of not killing him while he's a guest in their home to stay alive--and while he's at it, romancing the Canfield daughter, played by Natalie Talmadge, also Keaton's real-life wife (their son and his father also make an appearance). To top it all off, Keaton out does Griffith's river rapids climax from "Way Down East" (1920)--not an easy task by any means, as that, too, is an awesome sequence.

Nobody matched Keaton for taking physical risks for his art, either. Reportedly, he nearly drowned when filming the sequence in an actual river. The breathtaking rope swing, on the other hand, was performed within a constructed set and with miniature scenery, as well as with an apparent and brief dummy substitution for Talmadge, although it looks fantastic and still probably wasn't exactly safe. This is the same guy who broke his neck in another water-based stunt in "Sherlock Jr." The only one who ended up dying from the production, however, was Joe Roberts, the heavy playing the Canfield patriarch, who had a stroke during filming and would subsequently die from another a month after wrapping. In the meantime, he returned to finish filming. For good and bad, they don't make 'em like this anymore.