5:00 p.m.	Steamboat Bill, Jr. Charles F. Reisner (U.S., 1928)

The charming Mississippi River setting (actually filmed along the Sacramento Delta) is but one of Steamboat Bill, Jr.’s many pleasures. The film seems to have a direct line to Buster Keaton’s youth and soul in the tale of a sensitive, effeminate lad trying to figure out the mettle of manhood in his overbearing dad. Buster with an umbrella against the fearsome storm that rips the houses off people’s lives; Buster drawn, as if in a dream, to an abandoned vaudeville theater: “Keaton’s most entertaining balance of the instinctual and the cerebral” (Andrew Sarris and Tom Allen, Village Voice). The climax is one of Keaton’s most dangerous and carefully planned stunts: a wall comes crashing down on him but he passes, untouched, through an open window. Keaton was the true he-man among matinee idols—the scene was done unfaked, with a real wall.

—Judy Bloch

• Written by Carl Harbaugh. Photographed by J. Devereux Jennings, Bert Haines. With Keaton, Ernest Torrence, Marion Byron, Tom Lewis. (70 mins, Silent, B&W, 35mm, From Douris UK Ltd.)