Frozen North is another Buster Keaton/Edward Cline collaboration. Yet, it is a different kind of movie for Keaton. He plays the bad guy. It is a role I had never seen him do before.
The movie opens with its most famous site gag. Keaton comes out of the last stop on the subway and finds himself in the frozen north. It is a subway exit in the middle of a snow covered landscape. Most of the movie is shot on location, in the snow. At one point he uses guitars as snow shoes.
This is Keaton's darkest role. He cuts out a figure of a man pointing his gun in a poster and uses it as his partner when trying to rob some men gambling. In the film's funniest scene, he sees his wife kissing another man in their cabin. He shoots through the window, and kills them both. He then realizes that it was not his cabin, and that was not his wife.
I have read that Keaton is doing a parody of actor William S. Hart in this movie. I have yet to see one of Hart's films so I am not sure. Keaton does poke fun of silent film director Erich Von Stroheim. Near the end of the film, a woman imagines Keaton dressed in a quasi-military dress uniform and monocle.
Frozen North seems to jump around awkwardly, but it is not the fault of the editor. Apparently there are no complete copies of this film still in existence. Frozen North was considered lost to history until a damaged copy was found. The movie ends with Keaton being woken up in an empty movie theater. The film is merely a dream, and thus the confusing plot is actually better explained.
