Our Hospitality (1923) - film review

The McKays and Canfields are two families in a southern US state who have been at war for so long that they cannot recall how their feud started.   When one of the McKays is shot dead in 1810 by his sworn enemies, one of the McKay women sends her baby son, Willie, to New York, to be brought up by his aunt.  Twenty years later, Willie heads back to the town of his birth to claim his inheritance, not realising that his father’s estate consists only of a dilapidated house.  During the long train journey, Willie gets to know an attractive young woman, Virginia, who invites him to dinner at her house.  Willie accepts the offer, blissfully unaware that Virginia is a Canfield and that her brothers, having identified him, are busy taking pot-shots at him.   The Canfields welcome Willie as an honoured guest for the dinner date but intend to shoot him dead the moment he leaves their house.  Once he realises the danger he is in, Willie is suddenly reluctant to bid his hosts goodbye...

Our Hospitality, the first of Buster Keaton’s feature masterpieces, takes as its inspiration the much publicised feud between the Hatfields and McCoys, two southern US families that were at war for well over a decade in the late 1800s.  Despite the seriousness of the real-life events, Keaton had no difficulty in seeing and realising the comic potential that lay in the notion of an endless blood feud.  Some of the film’s set-pieces would re-surface in later Keaton films, notably the train sequence, which would reappear in The General (1927).

Appropriately, for a film about family loyalty, Our Hospitality features virtually the entire Keaton clan.  Buster’s father Joe has a substantial role, playing the train engineer, as does his wife at the time, Natalie Talmadge.  His recently born son, James (credited as Buster Keaton Jr.), appears in two roles, first as the young Willie McKay and then, at the end of the film, as his new-born son.   Talmadge was the sister in law of Joseph Schenck, Keaton’s producer, and would later be the main cause for the comic’s tragic descent into poverty and alcoholism, although there is no hint of marital disharmony here.  From the spring in Buster’s step and the warmth that can be felt in his scenes with Talmadge, it is apparent that the couple are still very much in love.  The rift would begin a year later, after the birth of their second son, Robert.

Keaton’s penchant for death-defying bravado is exemplified in a spectacular sequence involving a waterfall rescue.  This comedy thrill was one of most dangerous stunts that Keaton attempted in his career, one in which he came perilously close to drowning.  Our Hospitality is one of the most gag-packed of Keaton’s films, offering a cornucopia of visual jokes that barely gives the spectator a chance to rest between one bout of laughter and the next.  The best remembered sequence is the one in which a flimsy steam train (a near-replica of Robert Stephenson’s Rocket) zigzags around numerous obstacles in an increasingly desperate attempt to reach its destination.  When a troublesome mule refuses to stand away from the railway line, the train-driver has only one option: to move the tracks!  Today’s comedians and comic writers have so much to learn from Keaton, the unrivalled master of mirth.

© Brian Evans 2010

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