Frigo l'esquimau

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 like this movie, even if it isn't one of his best. We liked 'Bad' Buster simply because it went against the grain. It has lots of clever ideas and tons of references to the movies of the day, the scene where a tear trickles melodramatically down his cheek is a dig at William S Hart,a western actor who always seemed to have a scene where he cried, Hart didn't find the joke funny even if the audiences of the day did. If you are into silent movies then this film will hit it's mark, but, it's enjoyable anyway.

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.

I saw the Kino Video transfer of this which came with an introduction that explained that it was incomplete and that most of it is pretty much destroyed. So I didn't really get the whole short, but what I did get I shall comment on.

The plot, as it were, is hard to connect because of the missing pieces, but in general it involves Keaton as a very different character than most of his films: this time, as a daringly evil but tragically incompetent ... somebody... that goes around shooting people and chasing women when he's not falling through snow and into frozen lakes. It's quite darker and drier than most of his stuff, as the concrete-faced Keaton goes along shooting and killing person after person... definitely not his usual stuff.

I liked the parodies and take-offs he did in this. It was quite funny, the little pokes at melodrama from Hart's work and so on. However, I'd still like to see a complete copy so that I could get an idea on how this movie flows.

--PolarisDiB