Wasser hat Balken (1928)

Wasser hat Balken: Directed by Charles Reisner, Buster Keaton. With Buster Keaton, Tom McGuire, Ernest Torrence, Tom Lewis. The effete son of a cantankerous riverboat captain comes to join his father’s crew.

“This follows a pattern that Keaton would follow in a few of his most amazing films. The first half would just set up the situation and incidentally give a few mild jokes along the way. The second part is structured around a frantic set of stunts that are both comic and athletic. These must have astonished when they were new; its an odd thing that all the really interesting effects in films of this era were not for science fiction or action, but comedy.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eToday, these effects and particularly Keatonu0026#39;s, astonish ever so much more. Jackie Chan is the closest we have now, or recently. Chan knows that when we see something that we know is real: Chan jumping off a helicopter for instance, and when that is done with a comic tone, for some reason we chuckle more deeply.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003e(Stephen Chowu0026#39;s projects are a twist on this. We know the stunts arenu0026#39;t real, but they are much more extreme, and they deliberately reference other movies.) This collection of stunts has Keaton take a large river steam paddlewheeler, a rig it up to operate the boiler room by ropes from the pilothouse. Keatonu0026#39;s agility is absolutely phenomenal: today such acrobatics would surely be computer generated. Its not obvious that the man is risking his life. But as with his railroad movie, it is obvious that this is a real machine in a real raging river during real serious wind, though the wind might be generated with machines.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThis is big stuff, important to watch and real thrill.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eTedu0026#39;s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.”