WESTERN UNSETTLEMENT

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...