Daydreams (1922)

In a way, this is sort of the Three Ages of Buster’s independent shorts.  By that, I mean it’s less of a story and more of a conceit that allows for a series of gag-filled vignettes that are only loosely connected to one another.  As a result, it’s big on laughs but short on story (admittedly, this is much easier to get away with in a short.)

When his girlfriend’s dad doubts Buster’s prospects, Buster vows to go to the city and make his fortune, promising to shoot himself if he fails.  (Wait, what?!  No, seriously, that’s the agreement – that makes this another Buster short with some pretty dark humor for the ‘20s.)  He sends back glowing, carefully-worded letters to his girl about his progress, leading her to imagine his careers as being far more glamorous than they really are.  For instance, when he tells her about “cleaning up on Wall Street,” she pictures him as a stockbroker, when in fact, he’s naturally working as a street sweeper.  The short offers several sequences of Buster’s various misadventures, interposed with these daydreams of what he’s led his girl to believe he’s actually doing.

Even for a short, it’s a pretty thin story, and as the ludicriously-high stakes show, the details aren’t hammered out all that well.  The central hook is amusing, and the glimpses of Buster in these over-the-top success-story fantasies are fun (unfortunately, though, Daydreams only exists in fragmentary condition, and most of the daydream scenes themselves are lost – still shots of Buster in his dream scenarios stand in for the missing scenes.)

However, Buster’s assorted work scenes are really funny.  While the structural narrative of the short displays a little of Buster’s fatigue with the two-reel format, the gags are as shiny as ever.There are great flourishes throughout; some of my favorites include the poor dog in the vet sequence trotting behind Buster to bury his collar after they’ve been sprayed by a skunk (yet another good animal screen partner for Buster,) as well as the absurdity of Buster trying to clean up a ticker-tape parade in a wind storm.  Also, we’re once again treated to an excellent chase scene with some splendid cop gags.  I love Buster’s trick with the fire escape – so clever! – and the famous water wheel scene is fantastic.

Renee Adoree plays the girl here.  She’s not one of Buster’s regulars, so I’m not familiar with her, and she doesn’t get much to do – even though the short’s framework hinges on her daydreams, all that really requires her to do is stare thoughtfully into space for a second or two.  More familiar faces appear in similarly small roles.  Big Joe Roberts makes a brief appearance as the mayor, and Buster’s dad Joe plays the girl’s father.  As per usual when working with his son, Joe Keaton takes the opportunity to show off his talents for giving Buster a swift kick in the rear.

Warnings

Slapstick violence and a little gunplay.

Convict 13 (1920)

This early Buster Keaton short is just a wonderfully good time.  It’s fun, fast, creative, and irreverent, with Buster – as usual – displaying his quick thinking almost equally with his tendency to leap from any frying pan into the fire (brief spoilers.)

When Buster knocks himself out golfing (as you do,) he’s happened upon by an escaped convict desperate to trade his striped jumpsuit for something less conspicuous.  Soon, Buster wakens a wanted man, and it’s only a matter of time before he lands in the clink.  It takes all his Busterly cunning and nerve (and a little help from his friends) to survive life on the inside.

This is a short that brims with Buster’s inventive touches.  While its various sequences are very different from one another, each leads logically into the next, and each is packed with terrifically-entertaining gags.  Off the top of my head, I love 1) Buster putting from the middle of the water hazard (and then using his club to propel/steer his raft, 2) the delightfully-long penny-drop waiting for Buster to realize he’s just landed himself in hot water, and, of course, 3) Buster taking his pulse as his heart literally beats out of his chest.  So goofy – so Buster.  There’s also a great sequence reworked from Buster’s vaudeville days involving a rubber ball on a rope that’s really well-realized, as well as nicely adapted to suit the needs of the story.  Finally, I get a huge kick out of Buster’s absolute dedication to breaking his neck for the sake of hitting a golf ball; taking such tumbles over something so inconsequential makes that sequence even funnier.

Convict 13 is sometimes talked of as one of Buster’s darker shorts, mainly because the convict who switches places with Buster was due to hang, and guess who has to go to the gallows instead?  I wonder just how far afield that was for comedy in 1920.  I did notice that the short takes care to set up and show us Buster’s “out” before the actual hanging takes place, so we know exactly what’s going to happen.  Was that needed to reassure audiences?  Would they not have accepted it as a comedy if they really worried that his character was going to die?  Granted, the hanging scene is small potatoes next to all the breaking bad Buster does a few years later in The Frozen North, but I’m sure it was still fairly radical for its day.

It’s been a long time since I’ve reviewed a short with Sybil Seely playing the girl.  Every time I see her, I remember how much I like her.  Besides being cute as a button, she has a nice character to work with here, playing a smart, proactive young woman who helps Buster out of a major scrape – this is no out-of-nowhere love interest for Buster!  Big Joe Roberts is the prison’s most fiercesome inmate.  For whatever reason, as he grabs the guards coming to subdue him and tosses them around like rag dolls, I’m oddly reminded of King Kong, which is fun.

Warnings

Slapstick violence and a little actual gallows humor.

The Blacksmith (1922)

This is frequently considered Buster’s worst independent short, although a much funnier alternate version of the film was discovered in 2013 and we’ve come to realize that the common cut is most likely a preview version that went through significant reshoots prior to its official release.  I was fortunate enough to see the alternate version back in 2014, and it’s definitely far superior.  It hasn’t been commercially released at this time, but it sounds like it’ll be included as a bonus feature on Kino Video’s forthcoming Buster shorts collection, out in May.

For now, though, the lesser version is the one I’m more familiar with, since I’ve only seen the alternate cut once.  A review for that may be down the pipeline, but today’s post is on what, until recently, was believed to be the official verson of The Blacksmith.  The plot is pretty basic:  Buster, a blacksmith’s assistant, gets into huge amounts of trouble.  It involves horses, cars, a giant magnet, a pretty girl, a bit of a chase, and copious wanton destruction.

Much like I said with My Wife’s Relations, The Blacksmith feels a bit more like a Fatty Arbuckle short than a Buster short, although for different reasons (it probably seems mean to compare my least favorite Buster shorts to the Arbuckle stuff, but in general, I really am talking content rather than quality – while I prefer Buster’s style in his independent work, Arbuckle did very well with the kind of shorts he made.)  This short has a slapdash feel that’s reminiscent of the Arbuckle stuff, where things just sort of happen.  It comes across as a string of gags rather than a story made of gags that build and come to a head.  That’s the main trouble with this short.  It feels kind of inattentively made, with little of Buster’s usual care – repeating almost the exact same “obliviously making a mess of things” routine with both a horse and a car seems particularly sloppy.  (Side note:  the heavy emphasis on property destruction has an Arbuckle ring to it as well.  I could totally see Fatty and Buster accidentally destroying a Rolls Royce together.)

However, the short has its good points, too.  When Buster’s creativity shines through, it’s like a breath of fresh air.  The scene where Buster plays an accommodating shoe salesman to a fussy horse is a delight, and I like the little touches of the not-so-work-related uses Buster makes of the forge, like cooking his breakfast on it.  Also, who doesn’t love a good startled hat-flip?

No surprise, the short features Big Joe Roberts and Virginia Fox.  Roberts is the strict blacksmith, and Fox, as usual, is the girl, although the love story feels pretty tacked-on here.  They seem to get together more for something to do than anything else – we don’t even get to see Buster’s patented lovestruck look!  It’s unconfirmed, since Buster, Roberts, and Fox are the only credited names, but there’s been speculation that Charlotte Greenwood (who later appeared with Buster in the MGM film Parlor, Bedroom and Bath,) may also make a small appearance.  While I couldn’t say for sure, the actress in question bears a resemblance to Greenwood, and the flexibility she shows off definitely reminds me of Greenwood’s acrobatic performance in Parlor, Bedroom and Bath(the big scene she shared with Buster was easily the best part of that film.)

Warnings

Slapstick violence.

Hard Luck (1921)

Hard Luck is a bit of an odd short for Buster.  Like some of his other midrange work (The Goat comes to mind,) its construction feels haphazard at times, but it has a host of topnotch gags and comic business.  That makes its quality hard to classify.  While it’s not up there with the greats like (for me) Neighborsor The Scarecrow, it’s way too funny to discount.

As the title suggests, Buster plays a down-on-his-luck fellow here.  Everything has been going wrong, and as a result, he’s decided to take matters into his own hands and off himself.  However, his luck isn’t any better when it comes to committing suicide than it is with anything else, and he’s continually thwarted in his efforts.  In time, though, he’s swept up in an adventure involving a beautiful girl who might just have renewed his will to live.

The main detractor here is the meandering plot.  There are four or five major sequences making up this short, and while I see the thin but plausible threads connecting each one, I don’t know why these particular sequences were put together in the first place.  There’s no real reason for a man hellbent on killing himself to end up on a fox hunt, for instance.  Hard Luck isn’t the only Buster short where the story jumps around, but it’s the one where it feels most noticeable to me.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe because the premise is laid out so clearly at the beginning, and it’s almost entirely dropped for at least half of the short?  At the same time, the failed-suicide-plots conceit wouldn’t have been enough to carry the whole short on its own – while darkly funny, it’s not a story in and of itself, so it definitely needed something more.

But although the short is rather a miss in terms of story, its comedy is first-rate.  All the suicide gags are grim but hilarious, from Buster’s “goodbye, cruel world” blown-kiss farewell in his aborted hanging attempt to the sheer refusal of any vehicle to run him over.  Naturally, it’s not until he’s prepared to live that he finds himself in any real danger – he nearly blows himself with his own campfire, and who but Buster could accidentally tied themselves to a bear?  Disaster-prone doesn’t begin to cover it.  And really, the gags are fantastic throughout, even in sequences that feel extraneously to the story.  I’ve mentioned before how much I love the recurring gag of Buster trying to mount his much-too-big horse with faulty stirrups (the fact that he keeps coming up with new ways to mount after he’s already found a method that works is so, so Buster,) and the scene where he somersaults through a window just in time to receive a cup of tea is as funny as it is precisely-executed.  The short’s ending gag is most of Buster’s most famous, perhaps in part because it was thought lost for a number of years.  In Kino Video’s boxed set of Buster’s independent shorts and features, intertitles explain the missing gag and offer a surviving photo for a visual, but the scene has since been recovered and can be found online.

The short also features – who else? – Big Joe Roberts and Virgina Fox.  Roberts’s outlaw villain here is just shy of a mustache-twirler, and it’s the first role that usually comes to mind when I think of his work with Buster.  And Virginia Fox as the latest “girl” actually gets a bit of physical comedy.  It makes me smile when she tumbles headfirst over the back of the couch.

Warnings

Slapstick violence and gunplay, plus an implied lecherous rogue of a villain.

The Electric House (1922)

Today’s short isn’t as flush with stunts or gags as a lot of Buster’s work, but his creativity and mechanical sensibilities are definitely on display.  The released short is actually the second version of it.  The first time around, Buster broke his ankle while filming and, much to his dismay, had to put shooting on hold due to an injury he got doing something as pedestrian as getting his slap shoe caught in an escalator (he lived on a different level, no question about it.)  His resulting irritation made him scrap the whole production, but he must have still liked the idea well enough, because he came back and remade it later.

Thanks to a slight diploma mixup, newly-graduated botanist Buster is hired as an electrical engineer to update a wealthy man’s house (and why doesn’t Buster point out that he’s not an electrical engineer?  Because he gets a look at the guy’s daughter, obviously!)  Now, when most of us hear the words “electricity” and “house,” we probably picture stuff like lightswitches.  Not Buster!  When the family returns home from vacation, he has a plethora of labor-saving electrified features to show them, including an escalator, a dishwasher (in 1922, people!), a tub that runs on a track from the bed to the bathroom, and a pool table and sets itself up with the flick of a switch.  Of course, it’s only a matter of time until the real engineer, who was passed over for Buster, shows up to get his revenge crossed-wires-style.

As is typical for Buster’s highly-mechanical shorts, the electric doodads are the main attraction here.  Some are fairly impossible (seems like a bathtub can’t be both mobile and hooked up to the plumbing,) while others, like the electric trains running on a track from the kitchen to the dining room to carry dishes in and out, were used by Buster in real life.  They’re all pretty fun and make a nice window into how Buster’s mind operated.

The short is a little lighter on the comedy, but there are still some good bits.  Buster really sells his interest in botany in the opening scene by completely losing himself in the flower that the girl next to him is wearing in her hair, and there’s an amusing sight gag of Buster tying a rope like a necktie.  He also mines the escalator for all it’s worth, particularly in a scene where it malfunctions as he’s trying to lug a heavy trunk up the stairs.

Okay, so I knew Big Joe Roberts was in nearly all of Buster’s independent shorts (he’s the man who hires Buster to electrify his house,) and I knew Virginia Fox (the girl) was in a lot, too, but I don’t think I realized just how many she appeared in!  It’s only since I started doing full reviews of the shorts that I noticed I was writing her name almost every week.  IMDb tells me that Roberts was in sixteen of Buster’s nineteen shorts (plus Three Ages and Our Hospitality,) which sounds about right to me, while Fox, surprisingly, was in ten!  Even though she frequently doesn’t have much in do in these shorts, I always enjoy seeing her.

Warnings

Slapstick violence and some don’t-try-this-at-home with electricity.

Cops (1922)

Gotta love Cops – it’s been one of my favorite Buster shorts for quite a while.  With sharp humor, inventive storytelling, and fantastic stunts, it’s a must-see for any budding Buster Keaton fan.

Charged by the girl he loves to become a “big business man,” Buster’s attempts to come up in the world aren’t exactly what he’d hope for.  Despite stumbling into some early luck, he then proceeds to get hoodwinked, finds himself saddled with a monumentally uncooperative equine partner, and, thanks to some horrendous wrong-place-wrong-time syndrome, winds up the subject of a truly epic police manhunt.  Just another Tuesday, right?

Any discussion of Cops obviously has to start with the colossal chase sequence, featuring a veritable horde of the Keystone boys in blue.  Watching the short this time around, I was struck by a few things.  First, the chase is quite a bit shorter than I tend to think, covering only a third of the 18-minute short.  And second, having recently reviewed a number of Buster’s other independent shorts, I think the cop chases in The Goat, Neighbors, and Daydreamsactually have a higher proportion of really creative evasions on Buster’s part.  I think, due to the sheer volume of officers here, Buster is able to get away with just using the sight gag of his little fellow being chased by legions of cops, so it’s a bit short on the really original, Bustery escape stuff.

Which isn’t to sell the chase scene short.  Buster still gets in some excellent licks.  He nicely subverts the “hide behind a traffic cop” technique he’s used before, and the ladder gag is a comic masterpiece.  His final triumph might come off as a little too simple, but I just love it; it’s very sly and endlessly Buster.  (Also, not for nothing, out of all the times Buster has had to flee from officers of the law, this short gives them the most credible reason to be after him.  Not that it’s actually Buster’s fault, but an unfortunate mishap makes everyone very understandably think him an immensely shady character who needs to be stopped.)

The preceding two-thirds of the short are nothing to sneeze at, either.  The gags and story flow into each other really well, informing one another, building the humor, and moving the plot along.  Everything involving Buster and the horse cart is amazing, my personal favorite moments being the mechanical turn-signal and Buster’s restless pacing on the moving cart.  Everything just comes together splendidly, making for a really satisfying viewer experience.

This short also features – you guessed it! – Virginia Fox and Big Joe Roberts.  Both have almost ridiculously-small parts, but it’s nice to see them all the same.  Fox is Buster’s rather imperious girl, while Roberts plays the police chief.

Warnings

Slapstick violence and an act of anarchy.

The Playhouse (1921)

Can’t go wrong with this one.  Probably Buster’s most astounding technical cinematic feat, with its veritable cornucopia of Busters, and it’s darn funny to boot.  One of my favorite shorts of his – it never fails to amaze me.

Thinking about it now, the plot is thinner than in many of Buster’s shorts.  While the recurring gags rise and fall masterfully, the story is mainly a series of vignettes centered around the hustle and bustle of a vaudeville playhouse (like the Fatty Arbuckle short Back Stage, it draws a lot of inspiration from Buster’s childhood experiences.)  Buster plays an intrepid stage hand who, despite his talent for fouling up any act he comes near, continues to find new ways for the show to go on.  Meanwhile, he deals with the pitfalls of being in love with one half of a twin act.

This short, of course, is most famous for its tour-de-force opening sequence, in which Buster dreams that he’s everyoneat the playhouse:  a bevy of audience members, the conductor, every person in the pit band, the backstage crew, a dancing duo, and a nine-man minstrel act (yeah – not cool.  That said, it’s mercifully short, and while the blackface is obviously terrible, the acting/jokes don’t seem pointedly offensive.)  When we think of how impressive it can be to see the same actor performing opposite themselves on camera today – like on Orphan Black, where the double-/triple-/quadrupling is so seamless – seeing Buster do it in 1921 is practically magic.  They’re all Buster, every last one of them.  The man danced to a metronome to make sure he’d be in step with himself, shot anywhere from one-half to one-ninth of the frame at a time, and employed a cameraman who could hand-crank the film at preciselythe same speed in every take.

(I should point out that The Playhousehappened because Buster broke his ankle filming an aborted version of The Electric House and couldn’t do serious stunts or tumbling until it healed.  First, I guess necessity really is the mother of invention, and second, this is what Buster taking it easylooks like, people – playing more than 20 characters in the same short!)

But it’s not just a technical marvel.  It’s also delightfully funny, both in the dream sequence and in the rest of the short.  I love all the Buster’s little touches throughout the dream, particularly the various gags in the pit – I like the conductor continually scratching his back with his baton and the clarinetist playing so hard he almost drops his clarinet – and the nicely-differentiated audience members.  Later, there are some fun twin gags (including the hilarious closing image,) an amusing chase, an aquatic escape, an original and alarming application of breaking glass in case of emergency, and Buster doing an absolute bang-up job of pretending to be a monkey.  Also, there’s a pair of one-armed veterans in the audience who both applaud by clapping the other guy’s hand, and they just kill me.

Unsurprisingly, we see a couple of familiar faces.  Big Joe Roberts plays the temperamental stage manager (although to be fair, with Buster as a stage hand, he has good reason to be temperamental,) and Virginia Fox appears as the twin Buster has his eye on.

Warnings

Slapstick violence and a brief, unfortunate scene of blackface.

The Frozen North (1922)

The first few times I watched this Buster Keaton short, it didn’t do anything for me.  Not a thing.  There seemed to be very little story, I didn’t take much notice of the gags, and most of all, I noticed that Buster was acting uncharacteristically “bad” and I didn’t really care for it.  What unlocked The Frozen North for me was learning that it’s actually a parody of the melodramatic westerns of silent star William S. Hart; that made all the difference.  I’m not even sure why exactly, since I’ve still never seen any of Hart’s films, but now that I know the intention behind it, I can see this short for how hilarious it really is.  (A few spoilers.)

Buster is a bad man, a lawless rogue living in an unforgiving Alaska landscape.  He’s all about what he wants, whether that’s another man’s money or another man’s wife, and he’s not particularly choosy about how he gets it.  He’s rough, commanding, and hard-(cola)-drinking, and he’s ready for life to bend to his will.

From my understanding, William S. Hart made a career out of playing rough ‘n’ tumble cowboy types with dubious morals but a sensitive side (Buster parodies his famous penchant for glycerin-tear crying scenes) – an early example of the “bad boy” antihero, maybe?  Buster’s version of the character is definitely bad, even awful.  He tries to rob a bunch of gamblers at gunpoint (sort of,) he shoots two people in cold blood, and when he takes a shine to someone else’s wife, his version of wooing her looks a lot closer to how Big Joe Roberts treats the girl when he plays one of Buster’s villains.  This, I think, is the first part of the parody, unromanticizing the bad-boy swagger and making it clear that this guy is just a straight-up jerk.

Then, you get the double whammy of Buster being both kind of hapless at ne’er-do-welling and ridiculously cavalier about the consequences of his actions.  Those people he tries to rob realize he’s no threat when they see he’s using a picture from a wanted poster to hold them up, and immediately after he shoots his apparently-cheating wife and her lover in a fit of passion, he discovers he’s walked into the wrong house and it wasn’t his wife at all.  The latter is a perfect example of what’s going on here; not only has he completely bungled things, but he doesn’t care in the slightest that he’s just killed two people by mistake.  That callously dismissive air allows for some really black comedy that you don’t usually see in Buster’s work, but it’s very funny in a dark way.  I also love when Buster, trying to keep a visiting police officer from seeing that his wife is unconscious (not by Buster’s hand, I should point out,) puts on some music and pretends to dance with her, then unceremoniously drops her back on the floor as soon as the officer leaves.

Just setting a “western” in Alaska provides good opportunities for fun gags, and Buster makes the most of his locale.  There’s a fetchingly-decorated igloo, a fantastic dueling ice-fishermen scene, snowball-and-snowshoe baseball, off-the-cuff snowman disguises, fun with motorized sleds, and, my personal favorite, acoustic guitar snowshoes.  No one did it quite like Buster.

Warnings

Some over-the-top violence (including melodramatic killing,) rough treatment of women, and general unscrupulousness.

The Haunted House (1921)

Objectively, I’d call this a fairly good midrange Buster Keaton short.  Subjectively?  I just love it.  Even while I know the plot has some clunkiness and “being scared of fake ghosts” is a pretty flimsy theme to hang a story on, I have such a good time watching this short.

Buster is a well-meaning but disaster-prone bank teller who finds himself on the wrong side of an accusation of counterfeiting (because of course.)  Unjustly on the lam, he winds up fleeing to the actual counterfeiters’ hideout, which they’ve rigged up to seem like a haunted house – ostensibly, it’s so the police won’t poke around, but it feels like they’ve put way more effort into this than the idea strictly warrants.  Anyway, Buster has his hands full dodging “ghosts,” trying to expose the real crooks, and maybe even saving a pretty girl along the way.

For me, the absolute zenith of this short is the first 6-7 minutes, while Buster is still working at the bank.  It’s true that the connections between this sequence and the haunted house stuff are tenuous at best, but it’s so fantastically funny that I’ll never complain.  I adoreBuster accidently getting glue on his hands, which in turn gets on the money, the customers, and basically everything in the nearby vicinity.  It’s such a simple concept and, compared to some of Buster’s other work, a pretty obvious gag, but he does it masterfully.  When I think of The Haunted House, the firstthing that pops into my head is invariably Buster trying to “put ‘em up” while his hands are glued to the insides of his pockets.  I die.

Compared to that, the haunted-house portion of the short isn’t as memorable to me.  The fact that Buster is genuinely scared of all these shenanigans is kind of cheesy, and the gags tend more toward the disjointed-running-around variety, not building as organically.  Still, there are some incredibly fun gags to be had.  There’s a set of disappearing stairs that Buster just works comic wonders with – I think he comes up with an entirely new hook every time it’s used.  He has a fabulous method for knocking one of the bad guys out, he plays around with some fun camera trickery, and he fights a fierce battle against a red cape.  And for all that his being scared of the haunted house is silly, his actingscared is wonderful.  Even with the stone face, he does such terrifically funny “frightened” acting.  The ending is just sort of there, but it’s immediately prefaced with a delightfully off-the-wall comedic tangent about Buster’s misadventures in trying to reach the afterlife.

The short also features old Buster favorites Big Joe Roberts as the head counterfeiter (what can I say?  The guy gives good heavy) and Virginia Fox as the girl, charming but pretty underdeveloped.

Warnings

Slapstick violence and a little gunplay.

The Paleface (1922)

Given the subject matter of this short and the fact that it was the 1920s, it can be a little uncomfortable at times, which knocks off some points in my overall regard for it.  That said, it has some great humor, the narrative is put together well, and while it’s insensitive, it’s not nearly as racist as it might have been (yes, that last point is pretty faint praise, but it’s true.)

The members of a Native American tribe, having been cheated by some greedy white businessmen, are being forced off their land.  Three guesses as to who comes along when the chief orders his people to kill the next white guy to show up?  Yep, Buster the daydreamy lepidopterist wanders in and finds himself receiving a chilly welcome.  Ultimately, though, once the initial chasing and attempted executions blow over, Buster joins the tribe and helps them in their mission to retain their land, declaring that “us Indians must stick together.”

We’ll start with the race stuff – I’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating.  The short has definite race problems.  While I understand that, as the star, of course Buster is going to be important, his involvement with the tribe feels White Savior-ish.  There’s also the fact that most (all?) of the Native Americans are played by white actors in redface, including perennial costars Big Joe Roberts as the chief and Virginia Fox as the girl (who’s barely even there – Snow White and the Seven Dwarves lays better groundwork for Prince Charming, and he’s in, like, two scenes.)  This would’ve been standard industry procedure at the time – as such, it’s uncomfortable, and it definitely bugs me, but it’s very much a product of the era.  As far as the depictions of the Native Americans themselves go, for me, the only really serious infraction is when Buster cheats death through some quick thinking and they think he’s a god.  Verynot cool.

Other than that, it’s mildly insensitive throughout, but I don’t think it’s overtly racist.  After their early antagonism with one another, Buster and the Native Americans are clearly the “good guys” against the evil white land developers, and I enjoy the way Buster plays around with mixing the cultures.  Once he joins the tribe, I like the feather in his porkpie hat and what appear to be slap shoe moccasins.  Buster “conducting” a war dance is really funny, as is his pulling one tribe member aside to practice his footwork.  And as for Buster evading/outwitting the Native Americans when they’re chasing him in the early scenes, this is exactly the sort of stuff Buster pulls all the time.  He makes white cops, rivals, and thugs look foolish by besting them with silly tactics, so why not do the same with Native Americans?  Not to mention, mistaking him for a god aside, they’re fairly on the ball.  There are a couple of fun scenes where Buster thinks he’s gotten the upper hand, only to realize they’re totally onto him.

So what about the rest of the short?  Some great moments and very funny stuff.  The asbestos suit is a stroke of genius, I love the final gag, and there’s some impression action, including an epic tumble and an actual 85-foot freefall.  The little comic touches are really effective; I love the whole tribe lifting the chief onto his horse, Buster’s puzzled “is it raining?” gesture when an arrow appears as his feet (ha!), and Buster trying to punch a butterfly will always be hilarious.

Warnings

Slapstick violence and some racial/cultural insensitivity.