Our Hospitality 1923

The story

The prologue is melodrama. In 1810 the Canfields and the McKays are two Southern families locked in a feud so old that nobody remembers its cause. The fathers of both houses shoot each other dead, and the McKay widow takes her baby son Willie north to New York and tells him nothing.

Twenty years on, in the 1830s, Willie is a young dandy who inherits his father's estate and travels south to claim it. On the train he meets a pretty girl, Virginia, who turns out to be a Canfield. Her father and brothers learn who their visitor is and set out to kill him.

The rule that keeps Willie alive is the one the title names. Joseph Canfield will not harm a guest under his roof, so while Willie is at the dinner table he is safe, and the family can only wait for him to leave. Much of the comedy is a hunted man who will not step outside. The chase that follows takes in a rope, a runaway locomotive and a waterfall, and ends, as such stories do, with a wedding and the guns put away.

A parody of a real feud

The film is a parody of the Hatfield–McCoy feud, a real quarrel between two families on the Kentucky and West Virginia border. That feud ran from 1878 to 1890, long after the film's 1830s, so the picture borrows the shape of the story and not its history. The Canfields and the McKays are invented.

The joke is helped by how carefully the period is drawn. A programme note from the Pacific Film Archive calls the film "a sly satire on the very period setting it creates with painstaking accuracy". The hobby-horse Keaton rides, an early bicycle, was by one account so accurate that the Smithsonian asked to keep the prop, though the machine was already out of date by the 1830s.

The little train

Keaton loved railways, and the film is full of them. Gabourie, the studio's art director, built working replicas of early trains. The usual story is that Keaton picked a copy of George Stephenson's English Rocket over the American DeWitt Clinton because he thought it looked funnier. It is a good story and consistent with his taste, but it rests on those accounts of his choice and not on any record of the decision.

The result is a locomotive of toy-like charm and, at the climax, a runaway engine. Keaton's father Joe, a veteran of the family's vaudeville act, plays the engineer. Keaton would return to trains, and to a much larger engine, in The General (1926), the film that is better known today.

The river and the waterfall

The film has two water scenes, and the sources treat them differently. The river work was done on location. By most accounts Keaton, who did not use stunt doubles, nearly drowned in the Truckee River when a restraining wire broke while he was working in the rapids; one version says it took the crew about ten minutes to find him. Another has him swept down the rapids until he caught an overhanging branch. The accounts differ, so the details are best held loosely. The rest of the river scenes were shot on a set in Los Angeles.

The waterfall rescue, in which Willie swings out on a rope to catch Virginia as she goes over the edge, was not shot at a real fall. By one account it was built at the Robert Brunton Studios in Hollywood, over a large concrete swimming pool, with a miniature landscape behind it to suggest a valley below. He says Keaton did the rope stunt himself and swallowed so much water that he needed medical treatment.

A family affair

The cast is a Keaton reunion. Natalie Talmadge, his wife, plays Virginia, and by one account she had to be talked into it after objecting to filming on location. Joe Keaton plays the engineer. Their baby son, billed as Buster Keaton Jr., plays Willie in the prologue. It is said to be the only film with three generations of the Keaton family in it.

Natalie was expecting a child during the shoot, and the cameramen are said to have found ways to hide it. There was a sadder note. Joe Roberts, who plays Joseph Canfield, suffered a stroke during filming. He finished his part and died soon afterwards: a month after the last retake by one account, a few months by another.

Why it matters

It is Keaton's first feature with a single story. It followed Three Ages (1923), three parodies strung together. The film historian Jeffrey Vance calls Our Hospitality Keaton's first feature-length masterwork, and says Keaton drew on Chaplin's The Kid and Harold Lloyd's Grandma's Boy for the way drama and comedy could share a plot.

It shows how he built gags from character and place. The hospitality rule is a single idea that produces a whole film of situations. Critics later singled out the blend of drama and comedy, the composition of its pictures and the train sequences.

It did well at the time. Reviews were generally positive, from Variety to The New York Times. Figures for its takings vary: one puts its US takings at $537,844, and Keaton is quoted as putting its cost at about $225,000 and its gross worldwide above $500,000.

It has lasted. It has been restored by the Cineteca di Bologna in association with the Cohen Film Collection, and it was still being shown in special centennial screenings. Its outline has been borrowed too: the 2010 Telugu film Maryada Ramanna follows it, and so does that film's Hindi remake, Son of Sardaar (2012).