Steamboat Bill, Jr. (Joseph M. Schenck Productions, United Artists, 1928)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, August 26) my husband Charles and I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for the annual “Not-So-Silent Movie Night,” a showing of a silent film in the Pavilion with live organ accompaniment. The film was Steamboat Bill, Jr., a 1928 comedy starring Buster Keaton and his last made independently with Joseph M. Schenck as his producer. The organist was David Marsh, a young man who performed in a floral print shirt and tight blue jeans. Though his photo in the program shows him as blond, when he appeared last night he had dark hair and at first Charles mistook him for San Diego’s regular civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez. Marsh is based in Orange County, where he’s the president of the Orange County Theatre Organ Society. He teaches piano and music theory and used to be director of music technology at Villa Park High School. He’s also refreshingly sly and self-deprecating in his humor (a strong contrast to the egomaniacal Raúl!). He listed two works in the program he was going to play before the movie started – it’s customary for the organist to play a mini-concert while both he and the audience wait for the night to get dark enough to make it possible to see the movie – though last night he added a third work and started the night with it. It was the song “That’s Entertainment!,” written by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz for the 1953 film of their 1930 musical The Band Wagon. The two works listed on his program were an “improvisation on themes from” George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue to commemorate the piece’s 100th anniversary (it was first played in New York’s Aeolian Hall on February 12, 1924 as part of a Paul Whiteman concert called “An Experiment in Modern Music”) and the 1940 British hit “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” with music by Manning Sherwin and lyrics by Eric Maschwitz (who also co-wrote the haunting romantic ballad “These Foolish Things,” though on that song he took his credit as “Eric Marvell”). Though Marsh had introduced his version of Rhapsody in Blue by saying he didn’t know how to play the piece, so he did what organists usually do to play something they don’t know – they string together a few of its themes and call it an “improvisation” – his rendition was quite good and stuck relatively closely to Gershwin’s original conception. His “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” was also quite lovely, though a couple of airplanes (a familiar issue at the Organ Pavilion, especially on summer nights!) flew by and their sound dented, if not quite totally breaking, the tender mood Marsh was creating.

Then it was time for the movie, which though brilliantly funny (especially in its audacious second half) and surprisingly sentimental for a Keaton film, seemed to take an awful long time building up all the exposition needed for the second-half comedy to work. The story takes place in the fictional Mississippi riverboat town of River Junction. William Canfield (Ernest Torrence in a rare sympathetic role for him; he was usually cast as villains; in 1932 he played Professor Moriarty to Clive Brook’s Sherlock Holmes; and in his last film, the San Diego-set I Cover the Waterfront from 1933, he played a human trafficker), known as “Steamboat Bill,” runs the steamboat Stonewall Jackson, only he’s threatened with the loss of his business by the newer, nicer and swankier River King. The new boat is owned by millionaire J. J. King (Tom McGuire), who in a series of quick shots is revealed as also the owner of the town’s bank, the town’s hotel and just about everything else. (Though Keaton was never as obvious as Charlie Chaplin about the social comment in his films, it was nonetheless there; in 1922 he made the short film Cops, inspired by the 1886 bombing of a police parade in Haymarket, Illinois, and here he seems to be setting up the same kind of honest poor family versus unscrupulous tycoon conflict Frank Capra did later – and Capra got his start with another silent comedy giant, Harry Langdon!) Keaton plays Steamboat Bill’s long-lost son, William Canfield, Jr., who shows up at River Junction during a break from college. Steamboat Bill has never seen his son since Jr. was a baby (and Keaton and his nominal director, Charles Riesner, and writer, Carl Harbaugh, never tell us why), and when Jr. arrives in River Junction he’s telegraphed his father that he’ll be wearing a white carnation. Just about every other young man who gets off the train is also wearing a white carnation – including a young man who gives Keaton his in what looks a lot like a Gay cruising sequence, at least in 2024!

When the two Canfields finally encounter each other, Jr. has lost the carnation but is dressed in a beret and a fancy “college” jacket, and is sporting a thin “roo” moustache. Needless to say, Steamboat Bill, Sr. is not happy about having sired so nellie a son, and he insists on Jr. getting rid of the beret and finding a more butch bit of headgear. There’s an intriguing scene in which Sr. has Jr. try on several hats, and in an in-joke the one Jr. most definitively rejects is the porkpie hat that had already been established as Keaton’s trademark in his previous films (and in the 1930’s would become the trademark of jazz genius Lester Young). By chance, Jr.’s girlfriend has followed him to River Junction – and in a pretty typical bit of Romeo and Juliet channeling, she’s Kitty King (17-year-old Marion Byron in her first film), daughter of J. J. King. Naturally it doesn’t help their relationship that her dad is trying to put his dad out of business. At one point King even has the city government (which, of course, he secretly or not-so-secretly controls) condemn the Stonewall Jackson and order Bill, Sr. not to run her. Bill, Sr. takes down the condemnation notice and tears it up. Unfortunately, he makes the mistake of doing so in front of the town sheriff, who of course is in King’s pocket, and he gets arrested. Bill, Jr. concocts a plan to help his dad break out of prison by baking an enormous loaf of bread in which are concealed files and other tools Sr. could use to escape, but Sr. – who’s already bought a train ticket to send Jr. back to Boston – won’t take the loaf. Ultimately the end of the loaf falls open, the escape tools fall out, and Jr. ends up in jail in the cell next to his dad’s.

Jr. manages to get himself out just in time for River Junction to be hit by a gigantic storm (the script originally called for the Mississippi River to flood, but a real-life flood on the Mississippi in 1927 forced Keaton and Harbaugh to change it), and the part of Steamboat Bill, Jr. everyone remembers is the big storm in the second half and the havoc it wreaks on the town and its inhabitants. The storm was for real: to create it, Keaton hired six giant airplane motors and set them up around his location on the Sacramento River in northern California. The film’s most audacious gag involves Jr. standing in front of a house as its front wall literally falls down on him, and he’s spared only because he happens to be standing where the house’s open window lands. Keaton had already done this gag in two previous films with a considerably lighter front frame, using surveyors’ instruments to calculate just where he had to stand so the front of the building would not crush him, but this time the building front weighed two tons and he would have been killed for real if he hadn’t been on exactly the right spot when it fell. According to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, Keaton shot this scene the day after he got a notice from Joseph M. Schenck that this would be the last film the two would make independently, and Keaton was so despondent he literally didn’t care whether he lived or died. (In his later years, Keaton himself admitted that he’d been crazy to attempt that gag.) The film ends the way you’d expect it to, with Jr. saving Sr., Kitty King and her dad from drowning in the river during the storm, and Jr. lassoing a minister with a life preserver to marry him and Kitty on the spot, while there’s a nice worm-turning scene in which the Stonewall Jackson is still upright and sailing while the River King is shown sunk. Along the way there are some fascinating gags, including one in which while he’s in the local jail Jr. starts singing “The Prisoner’s Song” to his dad and making hand gestures to try to communicate that the bread has escape tools, and like the similar gag in Keaton’s 1924 film The Navigator that uses the song “Asleep in the Deep” it’s funny as it stands but would have been even funnier in a film with sound.

Unlike Charlie Chaplin, Keaton loved the idea of sound in films and couldn’t wait to start making them, but after Steamboat Bill, Jr. his life sailed into a perfect storm. Joseph Schenck arranged for Keaton to work at the giant MGM studio because his brother Nicholas Schenck was the president of its parent company, Loew’s, Inc. Unfortunately, Nicholas ran the business from New York but had nothing to do with actual filmmaking; that was in the hands of production chief Louis B. Mayer and his associate, Irving Thalberg. Mayer and Thalberg were notoriously intolerant of maverick filmmakers with independent streaks, and though Keaton fought the system long and well enough to make two more comedy classics, The Cameraman (1928) and Spite Marriage (1929), for his talkie debut Mayer and Thalberg put him in an awful musical, Free and Easy (1930), in which he was totally miscast. Keaton was having other problems than his work situation: his marriage to Natalie Talmadge (whose two sisters, Norma and Constance, were both bigger stars than she was; also Norma Talmadge was Mrs. Joseph Schenck) was disintegrating, and he was responding to both work and personal pressures by upping his alcohol intake. In 1933 MGM fired Keaton, and by the end of the decade he was cranking out cheap two-reelers for Educational and Columbia and recycling the gags he’d created in his glory years. Ultimately Keaton made a comeback of sorts, re-emerging as an elder statesman of comedy as his old films were rediscovered and revived, though he still had to take jobs with crappy studios like American-International to survive (where he worked out great slapstick gags for otherwise infantile movies like Sergeant Dead Head and Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine). It’s occurred to me that had Keaton been as compulsively frugal as Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, he could have bought out Joseph Schenck’s share of Schenck/Keaton Pictures and kept making his films independently – but instead he’d spent his money as fast as he’d made it and as a result we were denied a new set of masterpieces in which Keaton could have adapted to sound cinema as well as he did to the silent variety. For an indication of how Keaton’s career might have fared in the sound era under better working conditions, check out his 1930 film Doughboys (which I reviewed on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2017/02/doughboys-mgm-1930.html), based on Keaton’s own experiences as a draftee in World War I and the one time in his MGM sound career that the studio “let Keaton be Keaton.”