THE PALEFACE (1922) Starring: Buster Keaton, Virginia Fox, Joe Roberts Directed by Keaton Produced by Joseph M. Schenck First National Pictures William Thomas Sherman, wts@gunjones.com, www.angelfire.com/mn/hp/
I love the sweet ending. And may I just say, bravo to Buster for matter-of-factly presenting an interracial love story. And yes, I realize that girl is about as Native American as Lillian Gish, but still, no agonized apologies.
12:38, a good King Henry the 8th joke, all the Indians lifting the big Indian onto the horse. I remember reading how it used to take a bunch of men to lift big ol King Henry onto his horse during his reign.
12:42-12:48, the wind sure blew faster through the trees back in those days. No, lol, just kidding, I know it's because old time film projectors ran a little faster than everything actually moved
The Swastika on the blanket- it originated in Indian mythology but not native American Indian mythology. I'm sure Buster got this wrong. The film of course is very original, clever and funny, oddly modern at times like the hilarious strip poker aside, and for the times quite sympathetic to their plight, although many of these actors are in face paint. The stunts are daring, when he was across that flimsy bridge taking bits of the plank so he could stop the near naked tribe from getting him, and I love Busters making the most of a bad situation in lighting a cigarette with the flames they'd lit to kill him. I don't think nowadays you would make a suit from asbestos roll to stop Indians burning you to death! Brilliant move though! Lucky lady at the end getting to kiss Buster for "two years"! He's really beautiful and boyishly enchanting.
An astoundingly racist movie. The movie "The General" has provoked more discussion of his possible racism, simply because it is better known; however, this lesser known movie, with its stereotypical representations of native Americans, terms like redskin and savage, is clearly racist by today's standards. This identity of the period in which it was made (1920s) is significant, in that at that time white USA had little sensitivity to native American issues. Although I don't find any evidence that he later denounced the racism (died in 1966), I like to think that, based upon his later movies and performances, he was able to grow and mature with the times. It is useful to watch this and other early Keaton movies, not for the subjects explored, but for the acting. I do understand that for many, it may be difficult to separate the two; for them, there are his later works that carry a sensitivity that moves beyond the early racism.
Jeez, get a nuance. These are movie Indians, not real ones, and they were never meant to be real. Buster frequently parodied existing tropes, conventions, and other movies of the time. These "Indians" were based on literary and stage conventions which everybody understood weren't intended to be taken seriously. The bad guys, and the whole story for that matter, were equally unrealistic and conventional. All stage comedy characters at the time were based on stereotypes. Of course, we never do that today (well, not in this exact way anyhow). It's idiotic to judge the works of 100 years ago by today's standards. 100 years from now people will be fulminating at the atrocious way we treated other things and living creatures in our movies, in ways we can't even imagine and would probably be shocked at if we knew. Buster didn't have a mean bone in his body, yet I doubt very much that even in the 1960s he would have thought there was anything "racist" about this movie - particularly as in the 1960s very few other people would have either. I'm not defending the stereotypes - just saying that getting all heated up about it at this late date, in the 2000s, accomplishes nothing whatsoever except to wreck your ability to enjoy a silly, lighthearted movie that's about as realistic about Indians as "Peter Pan" is about pirates. If you want to see something that's genuinely racist, go check out "Birth of a Nation."
In my view, you have to discard notions of modern sensitivity to racism, and watch the film as it was intended at the time. To me although the Indians are white actors in make up and they seem stereotyped to a degree, for the time it doesn't seem especially racist, more that he portrayed Indians as caracatures more but was sympathetic to their plight, and of course he was one too, maybe symbolising he felt like an outcast in society in some ways, like the Indians. To expect Buster to denounce his portrayal of Indians in later life is redundant, simply because he was at the time of filming expressing portrayals normal for the time and in fact more positive than some other portrayals in film. And they do dress like that, and act like that in some ways anyway, I know as my mum had a native American penpal for years and his letters and photos were not too radically different from these portrayals only more serious. Let's just enjoy these films for their brilliance and creativity rather than playing the racism card.
