1,001 Films: "Our Hospitality" (1923)

With Our Hospitality, Buster Keaton broached - perhaps better, straddled - a still-extant real world political schism with a good degree of agility and courage, offering in the process a corrective to the polarising racism of The Birth of a Nation. The film nonetheless opens with a prologue of a melodramatic sort Griffith himself would have appreciated, as a father is shot down (and shoots down his assailant in turn) in front of his own infant child as a door-banging rainstorm plays out, the slaughter only perpetuating a long-running feud between two neighboring families. It gets its first big laugh from its depiction of Broadway circa 1812 (a furrow in a field), its second from the sight of Buster's bookish yet plucky Willie McKay aboard his customised bicycle (two wheels, joined by nothing so much as the rider himself), its third from the most rickety-assed railway in screen history, and from then on, it's more or less freewheeling.

McKay, the baby in that prologue, has ventured south into the country to inherit what he remembers as the grandiose and gleaming estate of his youth, only to find himself standing in front of a literally tumbledown shack and harassed across town by the McKays' longtime rivals, the Canfield clan. Almost the entire second half is an extended gag about boundaries. Invited to dinner by young Miss Canfield (Natalie Talmadge), and thus into the very heart of the dragons' lair ("He'll never forget our hospitality!"), McKay learns the menfolk's code of honour prevents his enemies from shooting him within their own four walls; the hero is thus beholden to finding ways to delay his departure, among them dog tricks and crossdressing. (And, later, the crossdressing of a horse.) The final round of stunts is technically impressive, but more a trapeze act than anything truly funny - a suggestion that Keaton was hung up on hanging around, just as Chaplin was on tugging on his audience's heartstrings. In Willie McKay, though, Keaton found an analogue for the new medium: a plucky contender capable of great civilities. The result's an eminently genial entertainment, and a reminder the movies were - once upon a time - almost entirely innocent.

Our Hospitality is available on DVD from Cornerstone Media.