Steamboat Bill, Jr.

The last of the independent features made in the prime of Buster Keaton’s career, Steamboat Bill, Jr. is a large-scale follow-up to The General, substituting a Mississippi paddlewheel for the locomotive, and replacing the spectacle of the Civil War with a catastrophic hurricane.

William Canfield Jr., the just-out-of-college, effete son of a no-nonsense steamboat captain comes to visit his father whom he’s not seen since he was a child. William’s father is engaged in a bitter rivalry with a riverboat king, coincidentally, the father of Willie’s sweetheart.