Steamboat Bill Junior

Buster Keaton (1927)

This film was Keaton’s last independently made film. The following year he made what he described as the biggest mistake of his life and moved to MGM. Falling foul of studio production technique, disaster led to disaster and soon his marriage was wrecked and he was an alcoholic. Within 5 years his earnings dropped from three thousand dollars a week to one hundred a week doing walk on parts for Abbott and Costello. In this film he plays the foppish son of a Mississipi steamboat owner in competition with a wealthy rival. Keaton’s fondness for the rivals daughter eventually leads to a reconciliation but only after a welter of classic Keaton gags culminating in a stupendous storm scene that completes the film.

(running time 70 minutes)

Score by Paul Robinson, commissioned by the 1996 King’s Lynn Festival. 35mm.

Fritz Lang (1921)

Buster Keaton (1926)

Alfred Hitchcock (1926)

F W Murnau (1922)

Carl Theodor Dreyer (1928)

Jean Cocteau (1932)

Frank Borzage (1927)

Buster Keaton (1926)

Buster Keaton (1927)

Arthur Robison (1923)

René Clair (1925)

Buster Keaton (1920)

René Clair (1924)

Vsevolod Pudovkin (1925)