In the earliest days on stage, they traveled with a medicine show that included family friend, illusionist Harry Houdini. Joe and Myra were Vaudevillian comedians with a popular, ever-changing variety act, giving Keaton an eclectic and interesting upbringing. So, in a way, Buster won, too.Joseph Frank Keaton was born on Octoin Piqua, Kansas, to Joe Keaton and Myra Keaton. It did what it was trying to do, and its target was a worthy one. (The gag was musty even by 1922.) After all, the movie’s original audiences apparently rolled in the aisles, recognizing the Hart parody. In lieu of all this, I think we have to give The Frozen North a pass, even though meanness doesn’t suit Buster, and even though the movie ends with the cheapest, hoariest joke in all of movies. For the most part, Arbuckle was forgotten for decades, except as a trivia item about the scandal. Arbuckle, of course, was exonerated, though his career was ruined, and he worked in cinema only behind the scene, under assumed names, from there on out. Hart was bigger than Keaton-in popularity, and in influence within Hollywood. So, The Frozen North, Keaton mocks Hart’s onscreen mannerisms, costumes, and demeanor, playing the character as the polar opposite of Hart’s screen persona. Arbuckle had essentially given Keaton his film career, and was perhaps Buster’s closest friend, and there was no way that Keaton was going to take Hart’s viciousness lying down. He didn’t know Arbuckle, and he didn’t really know the case, but that didn’t stop him from calling for Arbuckle’s head. Hart was huge, a big star, iconic for his rigidly moral portrayals of western heroes, and his self-righteousness extended beyond the screen. Hart, who-at the time-was vociferously accusing Keaton’s friend Roscoe Arbuckle of murder and rape. Keaton was parodying the western films of William S. There’s a method to The Frozen North’s meanness. The effect is surreal, and inventive, caught beautifully (again!) by Elgin Lessley’s crisp photography. Parodies of the Lincoln Highway, traffic signals, street cops, and taxi all abound in this snow-blinded rural landscape. The movie begins with Buster emerging from the last subway stop on the line-in Alaskan territory. Actually, the sludge follows him, as he brings the grimminess of the city with him into the Yukon. The pure whiteness counterbalances this sick, dirty film. So, it’s ironic and appropriate that the film is so drenched in white-white suits, white snow, white fur of pack dogs. Whereas Buster usually wages havoc accidentally, or at least inadvertently while trying to escape something even worse, here he’s just malevolent. (He’s thwarted by his wife, who shoots him.) Some of the sequences are indeed funny but in the snide, blood-splattered way of a Quentin Tarantino film. When his “nice” pitch to woo the other woman fails, he attempts to kill her husband, and then rape her. He opens the movie by trying to rob a saloon in the most cowardly manner possible, and spends the rest of the movie killing, trying to steal other men’s women, thieving, and causing morbid chaos. Buster’s dance with his wife’s corpse reminds me of the entire premise of Weekend at Bernie’s, only Keaton’s sequence is-thank God-much shorter.īuster doesn’t get any better. Not only does he not care about this, he actively pretends that she’s still conscious, to fool a mountie who smells something fishy and thinks Buster is a wife-beater. ![]() He then makes his way to his own home, and watches his real wife fall unconscious accidentally. ![]() He walks away, and there are no consequences. ![]() Then it dawns on him that, not only has he killed two innocent people, he’s done so because he entered the wrong house. Seeing a woman embrace a man from a distance, and mistaking that woman for his wife, he shoots the couple dead. He’s more exasperated than actively spiteful. In My Wife’s Relations, he was mean, though I would argue that he’s mostly absorbing the meanness of the people around him. In his shorts, Buster Keaton has been a chowderhead, a stumblebum, a naive nincompoop, and even a weaselly rapscallion.
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