Trailer
Plot summary
The Canfield and McKay families have feuded for so long that nobody remembers the cause. When John McKay and his Canfield rival kill each other, John's widow takes her infant son Willie to New York, and her sister raises him there in ignorance of the quarrel. At twenty-one Willie learns he has inherited his father's estate and takes a train south to claim it. Virginia, the young woman he meets on board, is a Canfield; her father and brothers meet her at the station. Willie asks the way to the McKay property and is shown a rundown house, far from the mansion he expected. Virginia invites him to supper, where the brothers are eager to shoot him and their father refuses to permit it while a guest is under his roof.
Cast
- Craig Wardas Canfield's 2nd Son
- Buster Keaton Jr.as Willie McKay - 1 Year Old
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Our Hospitality (1923)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Buster Keaton, who never used a stunt double, nearly drowned filming a river-rapids scene in the Truckee River when his restraining wire broke. The crew found him face down and immobile on a riverbank ten minutes later, and he shot the rest of the river scene on a Los Angeles set.
- Joe Roberts, who played Virginia's father, suffered a stroke on set during shooting. After a short hospital stay in Reno he returned to finish his role, but died of another stroke a few months later.
- The film's feud is based on the real Hatfield-McCoy feud that ran from 1878 to 1890, but Keaton set the story in the 1830s because he loved railroads and wanted it to coincide with their invention.
- Our Hospitality is the only film to feature three generations of the Keaton family: Buster Keaton, his father Joe and his infant son.
- Keaton's wife, Natalie Talmadge, was pregnant with their second child while the film was being made, so late in the production she had to be filmed in ways that concealed her growing size.
- Keaton cast his fourteen-month-old son to play a baby version of himself in the film's prologue, but the bright film lights irritated the infant's eyes and he had to be taken off the set.
- Keaton had art director Fred Gabourie build fully functional replicas of early trains, and chose a replica of Stephenson's Rocket over the US DeWitt Clinton engine because he thought it looked funnier.
