Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

AutCuddly Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Suman Roberson It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Frances Chung Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

mmallon4 All of Buster Keaton's silent films had a beauty and a grace to them, but Our Hospitality exemplifies this best. A mini epic, full of beautiful, lush scenery and landscape shots; visually speaking, I consider this to be Keaton's best film. Take the film's finale as an example, as Keaton walks along the edge of a cliff with huge forest backdrops stretching as far as the eye can see or the equally as impressive sequence in which an entire dam is blown up. But the sequence which best showcases this idealised look at 1830's America is the supreme majesty of the steam locomotive sequence; a predecessor to what would come in The General. This is one of the greatest sequences Keaton ever captured on film, with the music score on the Thames Silent's version giving it (as well as the film as a whole), an even greater sense of awe. Filming as well the construction of such large scale props must have been no easy feat. It's a sequence which is beautiful, funny and thrilling at the same time, filled with so many inventive sight gags. When Keaton's top hat doesn't fit on his head in the locomotive carriage, he puts on his iconic pork pie hat; that's more like it! It's a bumpy unstable ride to say the least, and even has a dog chasing it throughout for that extra bit of amusement.The set up of Our Hospitality is the type of melodrama which was rife during the silent period (and what Keaton himself parodied in his short The Frozen North). One family has a feud with another which lasts from one generation to the next, and nobody remembers what caused the feud to begin with ("Men of one family grew up killing men of another for no other reason expect their fathers had done so"). Ah simple but effective naivety; why can't we all just get along? Keaton's birth place is not stated during the film, but it's clearly located in Appalachia, prior to his character being sent to New York for a better upbringing; Keaton the sophisticated New Yorker vs. hillbilly red necks. Yep, we have a movie here ripe with hillbilly stereotypes. On top of tapping into the Appalachian cultural stereotype of feuding families, there are plenty of guns stored in the Canfield house, but when they're not allowed to use them due to their comical dedication to be hospitable, they just ask the townspeople to borrow a gun. Likewise in another scene Keaton sees a husband abusing his wife, steps in and throws the husband aside, yet the wife starts attacking Keaton himself. Keaton then runs away, followed by the husband ordering the wife back into the house. Ah the glorious lack of political correctness.

Bill Slocum "Our Hospitality" isn't Buster Keaton's greatest film, but shows a young pioneer on his way.As Willie McKay, Buster inherits a family estate down South circa 1830. To stake his claim, Willie must survive two things: 1. A ride on the "iron monster" which chugs ungently across hilly terrain. 2. The "hospitality" of the rival Canfield clan who wants to send an unwary Willie to the boneyard with the rest of the McKays.Watching Buster riding a train down South immediately conjures up thoughts of his later "The General," and there are plenty of other signposts for Buster fans. After finding himself unable to wear his foppish top hat in a coach with a low ceiling, Buster shifts to more practical headgear: his trademark porkpie, which remains with him thereafter. He's even joined this one time by his real-life wife Natalie Talmadge, who plays a young woman smitten with Willie to both their perils.I was prepared to not like Talmadge, as she didn't have much of a career in movies other than making misery of Buster's private and professional life later on. But she's quite affecting here. Keaton and co-director Joseph Blystone do a lot to draw out a naturally reticent quality in Talmadge; she and Buster work well together…at least here.The opening section features a very serious, overplayed dramatic "prologue" that isn't really needed and puts things on the wrong footing tone-wise. Buster gets a lot of mileage from his clattering train prop, but overuses the same gags. A big stunt at the end involving a waterfall, while jawdropping, lacks the comic underpinnings typically found with Keaton. It could be something out of "Perils Of Pauline."Most critically, the pacing is off. There are many good gags and funny bits of business, but the set-ups take too long. I'm still amused watching the third straight slow-loading flintlock gag in as many minutes, and that's something, but you so often get more from Buster.Keaton's genius shines through in many places, though, particularly at the Canfield house where he is the unwelcome guest of his would-be killers. They operate under a strict code of honor that won't let them shoot a guest (though the same code apparently says nothing about shooting an unwary victim in the back). Watching Willie work every angle he can think of to stay a guest is Keaton in prime form, whether presenting a series of really bad dog tricks or dressing as a woman.And there are some stunts as funny as they are awesome, like one where Willie is actually "rescued" by one of the Canfields on a steep cliff, and the two men wind up tied to one another as killer and prey. The period comedy is good, too; like an early shot of Broadway and 42nd Street in Manhattan's cowtown days, when Willie sits a bicycle watching a lone wagon pass by: "This is getting' to be a dangerous crossin'!"There's enough of that to make "Our Hospitality" good fun, and the stunt work, however off tonally, remains amazing even today. If it's not as great as other Buster comedies, it's Buster's own fault for making his later work so much better than this.

Michael Neumann One of the least revived of Buster Keaton's classic silent comedies is also one of his best: a typically graceful and hilarious parody of the legendary Hatfield-McCoy feud, which not only provides the expected thrills and belly laughs (the two often coincided, for example during the climactic waterfall rescue), but also recreates, with remarkable fidelity, the early 19th century American frontier (south of New Jersey). As in the best silent comedies the plot is little more than an outline, with Buster playing an unwitting Northern ancestor reclaiming an old family rivalry alongside his paltry inheritance. But the film is rich in comic detail and invention, with a remarkable sophisticated structure for its time, beginning with a stark dramatic prologue to set up the characters (Buster as a child is played by the actor's own infant son). What follows is a long, leisurely, nostalgic journey through the Shenandoah Valley aboard an antique DeWitt-Clinton prototype locomotive, actually no more than a stagecoach on rails (and donated after filming to the Smithsonian Institute). Throughout his career Keaton insisted he only wanted to make people laugh, but his comedies can be enjoyed just as easily for their style and technique, and this film in retrospect reasserts Keaton's position (in only his second feature) as not just another talented clown, but a truly gifted filmmaker.

hte-trasme This feature sees Buster Keaton as a young man who returns to the old South to claim an estate, only to discover that his family has been one of the participants in a Hatfield-McCoy style feud (here they are the Canfields and McKays), and the other side still wants to kill him. It's a good, solid comedy, and as always showcases a lot of great conceptual comedy and stunts, all performed by the "Great Stone Face" in a way that makes you marvel. It's hard to imagine anyone else quite coming up with the horse with the umbrella that looks like a woman from behind, the daisy-chain falling down the cliff of the two men tied by a rope, or the way the rear cars of the train end up in front of the engine. Often it's the uniqueness of this kind of humour that really makes Keaton's film's stand out.A lot of the jokes in this film, especially in the earlier parts, revolve around making fun of the past simply for being the past (central Manhattan used to be less developed, &c). As a viewer in 2009 I can't help but think that if I were as indulgent of decades past as this film is, I would probably not be watching it. Still there is a lot of material here and some of it works very well (I love the shifting of the train track itself when the mule won't get out of the way).The story of the film is a good one, but the humour doesn't seem to flow quite so naturally from it as in other Keaton films, with the notable exception of the sequences in which Buster must stay inside the house in order to protect his life. It actually seems to be funnier on digressions, such as the scene of Buster fishing in the vicinity of a soon-to-be-demolished dam.So while the laughs aren't one-hundred-per-cent wall-to-wall here, it's certainly, a funny, satisfying, well-made film, with the impressively perilous action-comedy sequences being a highlight for me.