I love this movie so much

Excellent but underrated film

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It's about 1810. The Canfields and the McKays are feuding clans. John McKay is killed and his wife moves with her infant son Willie to NYC to live with her sister. After his mother's death, Willie (Buster Keaton) is raised by his aunt without any knowledge of the feud. He returns to Rockville to reclaim his inheritance. He meets Virginia Canfield (Natalie Talmadge, Buster's real-life wife) on the train. She invites him over as her family keeps trying to kill him.The rickety old train is fascinating and extremely cool. The story is fun. The family trying to kill him is pretty funny especially when he figures it out. Keaton being scared is hilarious. There are some good stunts. There are some that seem much more dangerous than exciting. Then there is the waterfall dumping on him. The rock climbing looks scary especially when they're not on a set. There is a terrific waterfall rescue at the end that is more in line with an expert trapeze act. The movie has some fun and lots of stunts which is the hallmark of Keaton.

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.

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.

Buster Keaton's exceptional silent film is not just about a young man who falls for the wrong girl, nor is it just an exercise in the many ways that film can become an art form as well as entertainment, it is in more ways than one a nostalgic look back to a period of history when this country was fiddling with pieces of invention that would soon become many things we take for granted today. The scene where Keaton is riding a pedal-less bicycle shows his great comic sense as well as where the country was in that time. There is also a funny sequence involving a train, which is for the most part, simply some carriages hooked to each other and pulled by a simple wood-burning engine.All these scenes were Keaton's idea, in my opinion, to show the audience how far America had come since those days. The same could also be true in terms of the storyline, which centers around feuding and bitter hatred for no apparent reason. Indeed, one title card reads that in those days, men killed other men simply because they grew up hating that family. Here, Keaton is the rule-breaker, as he is in many of his other films. His romance with the girl is sweet and comical and how he alludes being killed by her feuding father and brothers can be suspenseful but is also funny as well.If you say you aren't a silent film fan, I encourage you to check this one out. The music is intriguing and enjoyable and Keaton is wonderful the whole time all the while showing the possibilities of film that he regrettably never got a hold of.