“Steamboat Bill, Jr. may be Keaton’s most mature film, a fitting if too early farewell to his period of peak creative independence .. its relationship to the rest of its creator’s work has been compared to that of Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest.” -Dana Stevens, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century

Buster Keaton plays a hapless college boy trying to win the affection of his tough, steamboat owning father, as well as the heart of the daughter of a rival steamboat owner, in this comic gem. The film resolves its mishap-ridden plot with the appearance of a slightly magical cyclone: one can see in Keaton’s commitment to the winds and eddys of the disaster finale the making of a legendary masterpiece.