The Iron Mule (1925)

Purely Joyful Movie!

One of my all time favorites.

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Al St John is the Engineer of the 20 Cent Special otherwise known as the Iron Mule. The film is a comic trip across the country from here to there. The town names mean little. It is the train & engineer that are the real center of the film.There is one clever sequence where the train goes into a tunnel but first the engineer removes the smoke stack & carries it over the hill the tunnel is in to meet the train on the other side. All the technology is crude & the engine appears to be less than 1 horse power as a horse stops the trip.This film being 1925 on the Kino Version I watched was Keaton as an Indian. There was also a musical background & at times the special effects like the train whistle blowing can be heard by the viewer. This film is entirely in black & white & is pretty much a pleasant train trip in the afternoon.There is not a lot of gags though the highlight is a man running from an Indian during the attack. As the Indian closes in he decides to remove his toupee & throw it back at the Indian. Turns out the toupee & possibly the Indian Costumes were made by- Sears Roebuck

This is an Al St. John silent comedy short. Although he is completely unknown today, he starred in a few movies with Buster Keaton--and it was from Buster he obtained the very, very old fashioned train for this film. In the Keaton film, OUR HOSPITALITY (by the way, it's one of the greatest films he ever did), the train was also featured just a few months earlier. Here in this short, the train is pulled out of mothballs and is featured.This movie is a very leisurely paced film about one of the earliest railway lines in America. It shows the train slowly departing and follows it through the journey. The scenes are cute and interesting, but no real belly laughs or excitement either.FYI--late in the film a group of Indians attack the train. Supposedly one of them is Buster Keaton in a cameo. I watched for this but couldn't clearly tell if this is true--the only adequate quality of the print didn't help.

Buster Keaton did everything he could to help his cinematic mentor and best friend Roscoe Arbuckle after he was banned from the screen in 1922 due to the scandal surrounding his trial (at which he was ultimately exonerated) on false charges of rape and manslaughter. In this case, Buster's generosity extended to letting Arbuckle, then directing under the name William Goodrich, use the train Keaton's team had built for his 1923 feature Our Hospitality: a working model of Stephenson's "Rocket," the first locomotive. The Iron Mule, built around the train, also features appearances by the Gentleman's Hobbyhorse, a model of the first (pedal-less) bicycle, which Buster had built based on an old print, the costumes (or at least replicas of them) from Our Hospitality—and Buster himself as an Indian chief! The version of The Iron Mule that is usually seen is only one reel and does not include Buster's cameo, but I was lucky enough to see the complete two-reel version at the Museum of Modern Art's Roscoe Arbuckle retrospective. I have to admit I would never have recognized Buster, who is heavily war-painted and never appears in close-up, if his role hadn't been pointed out by the program's introducer. He does do one or two distinctive falls, but obviously he was just joining in for a lark and with no intention of being recognized.The Iron Mule stars Arbuckle's nephew Al St. John as the train's engineer. Usually the embodiment of low comedy with his frantic mugging, splashy falls and vulgar antics, St. John was aiming at class here. In fact, it's hard not to say he was trying to be Buster Keaton, his erstwhile colleague in Arbuckle's Comique Company, who in 1925 was at the peak of his success as a major star. Keaton had long since abandoned his Keystone-style roots for dramatic stories shot with dazzling authenticity, and adopted his uniquely straight performing style. The trouble is, Al St. John playing it straight merely becomes nondescript. He keeps standing there striking the Napoleon hand-in-the-coat pose without making much impact. He's adequate, but he does not dominate the film, which has an ensemble cast of train passengers and attacking Indians. The film is beautifully shot with sweeping landscapes, though it fails to amount to much as a narrative. Many of the gags resemble those in Our Hospitality, with the train running into obstacles including livestock and low tunnels; and the gag in which an Indian attempts to scalp a man with a toupee (which got the biggest laugh from the audience I saw it with) was identical to one Keaton used in The Paleface in 1921. Still, all in all, this is a charming and graceful film, and a touching example of the loyalty and friendship between Keaton, Arbuckle and St. John.

In this short comedy, Al St. John makes pretty good use of a rare chance to play the lead role. It's also good to see the train from Keaton's "Our Hospitality" get a chance to be used in another 'role'. It was a wonderful prop, and though "The Iron Mule" is not quite up to the standard of Keaton's own features, it's good entertainment in its own right.The story is simple, with "The Iron Mule" encountering a series of obstacles and disruptions along the way, but some of the gags and gadgets are pretty creative (such as the river crossing segment). It moves at a good pace, and although they could have gotten more mileage out of some of the material, it's entertaining and certainly worth watching.