You won't be disappointed!

SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Buster Keaton's best known outing on a train was "The General", but he had a similar experience a few years earlier. "Our Hospitality" casts him as the son of a family that's been feuding with another family in the early 1800s. The other family had murdered his father, prompting his mother to move with him to New York. Now that he's returning home to reclaim what he assumes is a mansion, the other family is ready to finish him off. But a wrench gets thrown in the works when he falls for the family's daughter (Natalie Talmadge) on the train.The best part of the movie is the whole sequence on the train. It just goes to show that inventions aren't perfect when tried the first time! (of course, some of the mishaps along the way don't help matters) A few other scenes allow Keaton to show off his physical humor, especially the whole sequence in the river. Seriously, Keaton's timing is perfect. It all goes to show that you don't need words for a movie to be funny. "The Artist" seems to have renewed interest in silent cinema, and I would say that "Our Hospitality" is definitely one that you should check out.

This isn't one of Keaton's best efforts, but it still contains enough high spots to keep most viewers entertained. He plays a young man whose mother spirited him away from the Appalachian mountains after his father was killed by the members of a feuding family. Years later, Keaton returns to claim his inheritance (which turns out to be a derelict shack) only to find himself walking right into the household of the family with which his father had been feuding.The humour here isn't quite as physical as most of Keaton's work, but that doesn't stop him from devising some terrific sight gags, probably the best of which is the quirky railroad on which he makes his way back to his homeland. The tracks climb over small mounds in the ground, and can be pulled to one side when an errant donkey refuses to move out of the way, while the train travels at such a sedate pace that the dog Keaton thought he'd left at home is easily able to keep up with it and greet a confused Keaton when he arrives at his destination. Keaton's ability to convey that confusion without breaking his stone face is a measure of his effectiveness as a screen comedian, and you sort of end up wishing the silent era had lasted for another couple of decades so that his and the other comic giants' careers could have lasted longer.

After 'Three Ages (1923)' proved that he could direct a feature-length comedy {he had merely starred in 'The Saphead (1920)'}, Buster Keaton followed up its success with 'Our Hospitality (1923),' a film that set the mould for the type of films that he would continue to produce for the remainder of his time at United Artists. Keaton plays the polite and well-meaning dolt, incredibly naive to a point, but, when roused into action, he has all the determination, daring and agility of a circus performer. Natalie Talmadge, as the pretty and delicate Virginia Canfield, provides the necessary romantic subplot, just enough to please, without saturating the story's more exciting elements. The overwhelmingly-quirky comedy is rarely laugh-out-loud hilarious, but there's a certain quaintness and modesty to the material that really works, communicated most noticeably through Keaton's characteristically-underplayed slapstick performance. Silent comedians often compensated for the absence of sound by grossly exaggerating every expression and gesture; Keaton, on the other hand, reacts to each new obstacle with the solemnity of a monk, his inconceivable deadpan passiveness somehow amplifying the humour.It probably wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that 'Our Hospitality' was originally conceived to accommodate Keaton's passion for locomotives, and he was able to indulge in the construction of a working Stephenson's Rocket – an early steam train with a 0-2-2 wheel arrangement. This petite little locomotive provides some of the film's most memorable comedic moments, most of the enjoyment derived from low-key, episodic sight gags, whether it be Buster trying to wear his top hat in the cramped carriage, the dog that is continually in pursuit, the back wheels that roll loose, the donkey blocking the tracks, or the tracks themselves, which determinedly follow the contours of the earth with precarious rigidity. Though this little train scarcely travels at a walking pace, some of the techniques that Keaton developed here would come in handy four years later, when he filmed his Civil War train epic, 'The General (1927).' The remainder of the film is a sharp comedy-of-manners, as the wealthy Canfield family plots to murder Keaton's Willie McKay, the culmination of a generations-long feud between the two warring lineages.Production took place from a screenplay by Clyde Bruckman, Jean C. Havez and Joseph A. Mitchell, and the writers aim a few good-natured digs at the American South. The family feud, which is continued throughout the decades despite the fact that nobody remembers how it began, sounds too ludicrous to be true, but I was surprised to learn of a firm grounding in fact – the story was, indeed, based on the bloody real-life feud between the Hatfield and McCoy families. Paradoxically, the film also celebrates the indomitable "Southern hospitality" of the local folk, and the Canfield family (led by Keaton-regular Joe Roberts, in his final role) grudgingly agrees to only shoot their hapless enemy once he has left the cover of their home and so has ceased to be their guest. As one might expect, Buster Keaton risked his neck on more than a few occasions, the most unforgettable stunt involving his dangling precariously from a log perched at the crest of a waterfall, and his daring acrobatic rescue of the beautiful damsel-in-distress. Talmadge may have been replaced by a dummy, but Keaton was there, as always, in the flesh.

Featuring purportedly one of the most accurate re-creations of the antebellum South, Buster Keaton's second feature prefigures The General in its prominent use of an early wood-burning locomotive as both stunt-apparatus and homage to the past. The "Rocket's" trek from New York to Trenton occupies nearly two reels and stands as one of Keaton's towering achievements. The train suffers animal obstructions, uneven tracks, resourceful hobos, and design flaws while its passengers are jostled about, their faces smudged by the fumes. Everywhere on the journey, onlookers gather to watch this strange contraption. One of Keaton's best visual gags is a long shot of farmhands scurrying towards the foreground to watch the train pass. The subject is kept out of view for a good thirty seconds until it rushes in from off-screen, its two-car caboose shambling past the observers who plainly return to their jobs following this all-too-brief spectacle. Keaton is clearly fascinated with documenting reactions to progress: in one scene, he sits on his hobbyhorse waiting at a crosswalk as an old guard relates the dangers of horse-drawn carriages.Mostly though, as in all Keaton films, his precise sense of visual humor is the true subject, an ingenious succession of absurd predicaments, obscured compositional elements, and infinite off-screen space that seems to lurk just beyond camera, permanently ready to throw another obstacle in the hero's path. Take the fishing scene, for example: Keaton, on the run from a rival family, grabs a pole and attempts to blend in with the landscape. Cut to two farmers, who blow up a nearby dam to irrigate their crops. Keaton, seated beneath the spot of runoff but fortunately set in from the ledge, is blocked by the waterfall just as the brothers emerge in frame, looking in his direction. Or the chase down a mountainside, as Keaton ties himself to a rope that suddenly drops into view, unaware that his pursuer is attached to the other end. His comic gift lies in creating humor through disjunction, in this case between what we can see and what his protagonist cannot—a very sophisticated punch line that would likely be lost without his exact incorporation of camera placement, staging, set design, and editing. The thrilling, climactic waterfall rescue is Keaton's greatest coup, with a bit of physical timing that must be seen to be believed. For the attentive viewer, Keaton's movies never stop giving, seeming to transcend physical boundaries right before our eyes.