Comedy Part two: Steamboat Bill, Jr.

This is the Buster Keaton film with the hurricane sequence at the end. The one where the house falls on Keaton, but the strategically placed window allows him to walk away unscathed. One of the reasons the movie holds up is this: the 1928 special effects are kept to a minimum (wavy etched cartoon lines to simulate electricity and a flying house that lands on someone, 11 years before "The Wizard of Oz").

Like Chaplin, we're left with an astounding record of a physical performance.

This time, I was struck by his acting style. "The Great Stone Face" is really a way of describing a very modern, barely minimalist technique. Here, he's surrounded by actors and they're acting, acting acting: not really that awful silent movie style - it was 1928, after all - but they all could have been in a Frank Capra movie, while Keaton seems to exist in his own space, sometimes just barely moving his eyes in reaction. He's Clint Eastwood for laughs.

But then, when he has to, he does something really great. Americans seem to hate clowns and they really hate mimes, but when Keaton has to mime something, he really shows us how it should be done: he has to "tell" his father silently, behind the back of the jailer, that there are tools for escape hidden in the stupidly large loaf of bread he's brought to the prison. So, sitting in a chair, using just his arms and the upper half of his body, he mimes his plan: the father can saw through the bars, bend them out of the way, climb out the window, and run away from the jail.
It's a lot like the Chaplin "Parker House Roll" bit that, I think, everybody knows.

And then there's that one shot: the camera backs away, the hurricane is in full swing, you're looking at two inches of mud as far as the eye can see, and there's Keaton right in the middle, really little more than a silhouette, slipping and falling and fighting against the wind. It's a real man-against-nature existential moment and I'm not sure if it affects everyone in the same way - it's really almost a cartoon at that point - but it's a moment when Keaton is really human, really funny, and really stands-in for all of us.