Joe Roberts

From 1920 to 1965, the great Buster Keaton made spectacular use of locomotives in his films. This video essay charts the course of his iconic cinematic career across the many tracks he rode along on screen: as a young man in the surge of his silent movie ascent in Our Hospitality, while making his masterpiece The General, and traversing the width of Canada on a railway speeder car as an old man in The Railrodder.

A young man falls for a young woman on his trip home; unbeknownst to him, her family has vowed to kill every member of his family.

The rituals of courtship, romantic rivalry, and love play out three times as a man vies with a villain for the girl. In the Stone Age, the rivalry is set off by dinosaurs, a turtle used as a ouija board, and a round of golf with stones. In ancient Rome, the men display their brawn through a chariot race, using dogs instead of horses. In contemporary times, the man finds himself overcome by modernity, including a very fragile car.

Newlyweds receive a build-it-yourself house as a wedding gift—and the house can, supposedly, be built in "one week". A rejected suitor secretly re-numbers packing crates, and the husband struggles to assemble the house according to this new 'arrangement' of its parts.

A series of misadventures occur when Buster is mistaken for a criminal on the lam.

Buster clowns around in a blacksmith's shop until he and the smithy get in a fight which sends the smithy to jail. Buster helps several customers with horses, then destroys a Rolls Royce while fixing the car parked next to it.

The Romeo and Juliet story played out in a tenement neighborhood with Buster and Virginia's families hating each other over the fence separating their buildings.

Upon waking from the dream of a theater peopled entirely by numerous Buster Keatons, a lowly stage hand causes havoc everywhere he works.

A down on his luck young man makes several attempts at committing suicide but fails them too. He then finds himself becoming more confident through a series of petty adventures, to such an extent that this becomes his undoing.

In order to impress the father of a girl he is keen on, a young man goes to the city in search of work. In his letters home he writes of his various jobs which her imagination expands into much nobler ones than those that he is actually attempting.

Buster and a woman are mistakenly married and her initially unfriendly family begins to treat him nicely when they come to believe he has a large inheritance awaiting him.

A butterfly collector unwittingly wanders into an Indian encampment while chasing a butterfly, but the tribe has resolved to kill the first white man who enters their encampment because white oil tycoons are trying to force them from their land.

Botany major Buster mistakenly graduates in electrical engineering and is hired to wire a new home.

Two farmhands compete for the love of the farmer's daughter.

Buster Keaton gets involved in a series of misunderstandings involving a horse and cart. Eventually he infuriates every cop in the city when he accidentally interrupts a police parade.

An American boy turns out to be the long-lost heir of a British fortune. He is sent to live with the cold and unsentimental lord who oversees the trust.

A mix of guns and mistaken identity leads to chaos in this satirical parody of William S. Hart's melodramatic westerns, finding Buster in the frozen north - "the last stop on the subway".

A young golfer is mugged by an escaped convict and finds himself in a prison where he foils a jailbreak.

A bank teller becomes involved with a hold-up, counterfeiters and a theatrical troupe posing as spooks in a haunted house.

In an attempt to forget his lost sweetheart, Buster takes a long trip at sea where he boards a whaling ship with a strict captain.

Buster is thrown off a train near an amusement park. There he gets a job in a shooting gallery run by the Blinking Buzzards mob. Ordered to kill a businessman, he winds up protecting the man and his daughter by outfitting their home with trick devices.

THE MISFIT - starring Clyde Cook, with Blanche Payson and Joe Roberts. A rarely-seen silent comedy short. Henpecked hubby Clyde totes groceries and paints floors for his wifey, escaping at last...by joining the U.S. Marines. The basic training sequence was shot at the Buster Keaton studios; this may be "Big" Joe Roberts' final screen role.

A free-spirited girl is caught between her love for her husband and her attraction to a handsome adventurer.