OUR HOSPITALITY
starring Buster Keaton and Natalie Talmadge
SCREENLAND
March 1924
"Our Hospitality" has one serious weakness. It is entirely too long, running over six reels. Yet, the opus has amazingly humorous qualities in spots. The hero, no other than Monsieur Keaton, starts south to take possession of his ancestral home. The time is 1830, and the young man makes the trip over an amazing one-track railroad which invests the adventure with something of the epic quality of a Covered Wagon trip. Arriving in Kentucky, Keaton finds himself constituting one-half of an old feud. He discovers that while he is the guest of his enemies, he is safe, owing to the good old rules of Southern hospitality, and he declines to move.
"Our Hospitality" has a vast amount of comic ingenuity, but it is some two reels too long. Comedians will insist upon making feature pictures! Yet our comedies are far in advance of our dramas in points of freshness and cleverness. This "Our Hospitality" has more originatlity than all the other pictures of the month, "The Ten Commandments" included.
OUR HOSPITALITY
starring Buster Keaton and Natalie Talmadge
HARRISON'S REPORTS
November 17, 1923
This comedy-drama excels primarily because of its fascinating originality; not a foot of it is commonplace. As the action supposedly occurs in New York City in 1830, ample opportunity is afforded for many quaintly charming costumes and for the showing of the now old-fashioned mode of living and of travel characteristic of that time. The many scenes of the narrow-gauge "limited," the prototype of our modern steel trains, showing it crawling to its destination so slowly that the hero's dog has no trouble in trotting along under it after the manner of he coach-dog. The sequence of scenes that picture the trip of the "Limited" from Jersey City to the Blue Ridge Mountains is the most delightful novelty seen in months. In one scene a mule is shown standing beside the track. Unable to cajole the beast away from danger, the engineer - he is engineer, fireman and everything else - jumps out of his place, moves the track, and then the train goes on its way. In another scene, part of the locomotive is shown entering a tunnel, and then backing out; it happens that a farmer is driving three cows through the tunnel and evidently has the right of way. There are many other scenes equally amusing.
A bitter feud that had for generations existed between two Virginia families, and the final burying of the hatchet when the son of one house marries the daughter of the other, forms the foundation of the story.
Natalie Talmadge, Buster Keaton's young wife, and their baby
son are in the cast. Ralph Bushman , son of Francis X. Bushman,
is also among those present. "Our Hospitality" should
please well and all.
For more information, see "Our Hospitallity" as our "Feature fo the Month"