Starring Buster Keaton, Tom McGuire and Ernest Torrence
Produced by Buster Keaton Productions and Joseph M. Schenck Productions
William Canfield's business is in trouble.
He runs a paddleboat on the Mississippi River. His boat lacks passengers and is starting to fall apart around him.To make matters worse, the local business mogul has launched his own luxury riverboat to compete with Steamboat Bill's Stonewall Jackson.
Bill does receive one happy bit of news:help in the form of a son he never met is on the way. Junior is coming from college in Boston and, with such a gargantuan, muscular father, the son must be the second coming of Paul Bunyan. Right?
Wrong. Off the train steps a rail-thin young man in a beret who couldn't be less like his father. His father works to toughen his son up, exchanging his beret for a manlier hat and encouraging him to throw a punch at the rival riverboat captain. Try as he might though, Junior's apple clearly fell a little farther from the tree.
Complicating matters is the presence of Junior's girlfriend in town. She's also home from college and is (of course) the daughter of Steamboat Bill's chief rival John King. Both father's forbid their children from seeing one another.
When the Stonewall Jackson is condemned by the local officials, Bill loses his temper and is thrown into jail. Can Junior save the family business, spring his dad from prison win the girl and survive the devastating cyclone that whirls through town?
If there was any doubt that Buster Keaton was the king of silent comedy, if you had some notion the Charlie Chaplin might be the true master of slapstick and pathos in the 1920s, Steamboat Bill Jr. doesn't just slam the door on such thoughts. It drops a house on them. Literally.
It's a few seconds, but it is an amazing moment in its ambition and execution. It's serves as such an astounding crescendo to the climactic cyclone sequence, it's easy to overlook the rest of the action.
Which is almost (stressing "almost") a shame because Steamboat Bill Jr. really is Keaton at his perfect best. We see his stone-faced expressiveness as he searches for his father when he arrives in town. His comic timing when he delivers tools to his father in jail or when he's attempting to sneak onto the rival ship. His athleticism as vaults from deck-to-deck on the Stonewall Jackson. And his fearlessness as he clings to an uprooted tree as it flies across town.
And that's what Keaton's characters are about time and time again. He gets by on luck and pluck. He sets his sights on the girl and hurls himself through every obstacle God and man place before him. He's a hero, plain and simple.
The rest of the cast is good, but Ernest Torrence is great as Steamboat Bill Sr. He brings the same menacing presence to this comedy that we saw in his villainous turn in Tol'able David. Here, he's a hulk of a man, stubborn and set in his ways, the perfect foil to his weak son.
Steamboat Bill Jr. is about as flawless as comedy gets. Laugh-out-loud moments and death-defying stunts all build to an ending sure to leave you happy.
***** out of *****
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