Sunday October 23 11:00 pm ET

Although not the first Keaton short to use a dream framework for the narrative, The Frozen North (1922) demonstrates his increasing sophistication with this device, starting with the opening image depicting a subway station entrance in the middle of a snowy landscape. It is not difficult to see why the Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel admired Keaton's work. The film is mainly a brutal parody of William S. Hart Westerns, though it also contains other cinematic allusions, including a moment where Keaton dresses up like one of Erich Von Stroheim's sadistic Prussian officers.

Keaton's performance lampoons Hart's mannerisms generally, but to viewers at the time the most obvious reference would have been the image of glycerin tears streaming down one of his cheeks when he believes he has discovered his wife with another man. In one interview Keaton stated: "I tried my best to be Bill Hart, so much so that Bill Hart didn't speak to me for a couple years after I made it. [...] He was a great actor, but he got hammy at the end of his career. He always looked for the opportunity to... cry, even with two guns strapped to his side out in the desert." However, as Keaton biographer Marion Meade points out, it is possible that Hart responded the way he did not just because of how Keaton imitated him, but also because of how he turned the character into a "thief and a bully, a seducer and a murderer." In that regard the character is atypical for a Keaton protagonist, giving the short an unusually dark edge.

Producer: Joseph M. Schenck
Director: Eddie Cline, Buster Keaton
Screenplay: Eddie Cline, Buster Keaton
Cinematography: Elgin Lessley
Cast: Buster Keaton (The Bad Man), Joe Roberts (The Driver), Sybil Seely (Wife), Bonnie Hill (The Pretty Neighbor), Freeman Wood (Her Husband), Edward F. Cline (The Janitor).
BW-19m.

by James Steffen