Am I right in thinking that the train was built for this film? Wouldn't that have been enormously expensive for a movie made in 1923?
I would be fascinated to learn about the making of this film - about locations, the laying of the tracks, the waterfall sets, whether the train survived and was exhibited. Is there a book/article that describes this?
Starting with Our Hospitality, Keaton began working on an ever grander scale: this train may have been expensive to produce, but it was nothing compared with creating and then wrecking a replica of a Civil War-era locomotive in The General, or creating the entire cyclone sequence in Steamboat Bill, Jr. It was also pretty small-scale compared with the sets for, say, Ben-Hur or Douglas Fairbanks' Robin Hood. Silent movies went in for spectacle in a big way, making many of them far more impressive than studio products of the 1930s or 40s that tended to use models, back-projection and process shots; and to me more impressive than present-day computer-generated effects. There's no equivalent to seeing something actually happen.
The train in Our Hospitality, a replica of Stephenson's "Rocket," the first-ever locomotive, is a uniquely charming prop. Probably the best source for information about the making of Our Hospitality is Rudi Blesh's biography titled Keaton, which has a fairly in-depth chapter on the whole experience. As you probably know, Buster had a life-long passion for trains, which is why he was drawn to re-creating the Rocket.
As for what happened to the train: in 1925 Buster let his friend Roscoe Arbuckle, then directing under the name William Goodrich (having been banned from the screen following the scandal of his trial on false charges of rape and manslaughter) use the train for a two-reel comedy called The Iron Mule. Buster even makes a guest appearance as an Indian Chief! The film is based on the train-journey sequence in Our Hospitality, but stars Al St. John as the engineer, the role played by Buster's father Joe Keaton in Hospitality. (Incidentally, I wrote a review of The Iron Mule.) At the end of The Iron Mule the train gets pretty beat up during an Indian raid; what happened to it after that I don't know.
However, I do know what happened to the Gentleman's Hobbyhorse, the model of the first ever (pedal-less) bicycle, which Buster also built from an old print for Hospitality. Someone from the Smithsonian saw it and, since no actual example of this object existed, asked Buster to donate his model to the collection, which he did. He was quite proud of this contribution, and many years later took his wife Eleanor to see the Gentleman's Hobbyhorse when they were in Washington.
Many thanks for an interesting and informed note. I shall look out for "The Iron Mule".
It's 30 years since I read Blesh's book. Maybe it's time to read it again.
You're welcome! I believe "The Iron Mule" appears on Kino's Slapstick Encyoclopedia set, in the "Keaton, Arbuckle and St. John" volume. This is the one-reel version, but you will at least get to see the train.
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