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As signaled by its title, Buster Keaton's Go West (1925) borrows as a template for its plot a familiar narrative of national migration and settlement, with the comic protagonist traversing a continent that in nineteenth‐century US culture was often figured as an ever receding ‘frontier’. Drawing on contemporaneous interviews, reviews and press book materials, this paper examines the ways in which Go West reworks elements of a westward migration narrative derived from popular histories and related genre forms. Made at a time when producer Joseph Schenck was touting Keaton's capacity to produce dramatically unified feature‐length films, Go West synthesizes elements of physical comedy with a sentimental story, exposing qualities of estrangement and unsettlement at the tap root of both Western melodrama and urban slapstick. Through the crossing of genres, moreover, Go West reconfigures the cultural map of the western migration plot in ways appropriate to changing conceptions of national geography in the early...

The papers collected in this special issue on Buster Keaton share a commitment to locating the work of the now legendary comic actor and director within historically specific contexts. Drawing on v...

Rick Altman, ed. Genre: The Musical. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 228 pp. $9.95 paper. Jane Feuer. The Hollywood Musical. Blooming‐ton, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1982. 131 pp. $7.95 paper. Clive Hirschhorn. The Hollywood Musical. New York: Crown, 1981. 456 pp. $17.95 cloth. Ted Sen nett. Hollywood Musicals. New York: Henry N. Abrams, Inc., 1981. 384 pp. $50.00 cloth. Ethan Mordden. The Hollywood Musical. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981. 260 pp. $15.95 cloth. $8.95 paper.

Lucy Fischer, ed. Jacques Tati: A Guide to References and Resources. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1983. 160 pp. $26.00 cloth.