The Boat has all the resilience, pig-headedness, and strangeness of the best Keaton films. It ends perfectly; but if it were to go on one has no doubt that this extraordinary family (wife and children behave like extensions of Keaton himself) would next be found setting up some ultra-ingenious desert island shack. The survival power of the Keaton character is never seriously in question. But the element of melancholy … still bites. Keaton's humour is seldom destructive except at his own expense; and the collapse of the house at the beginning of The Boat seems to me one of the most strangely and sorrowfully and totally comic moments in cinema.
By now, the principles of Keaton films were set—of Keaton, that is, looked on as director rather than performer. There are obvious rules of construction, like the slow starts and all-out finishes. But I would suggest three basic elements of Keaton comedy, all in evidence in The Boat. First, there is the concern with plot, adventure, real hazards. I find the storm sequence reminiscent, of all unlikely things, of the hurricane in [Ichikawa's] Alone on the Pacific, a comparison one could never begin to make if Buster were just a booby adrift in a studio mock-up boat. Second, there is the sense of place. In The Boat this is no more than the modest little harbour whose yachts and boat-houses can be seen in the background of the launching sequence. But if this scene were staged in a studio tank, it could become just a pretty gag. Here it acquires the utter lunacy of some freakish happening in real life.
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