Steamboat Bill Jr. - Production

Production

The cyclone sequence was shot in Sacramento, California. Original plans called for an ending with a flood sequence, but the devastating 1927 Mississippi River Flood caused a rewrite on short notice. $135,000 worth of breakaway street sets were built on a riverbank, to be systematic destroyed with six powerful Liberty-motor wind machines and a 120-foot (37 m) crane. Keaton himself, who calculated and performed his own stunts, was suspended on a cable from the crane which hurled him from place to place as if airborne.

The sequence is punctuated by Keaton's single most famous stunt. He stands in the street, making his way through the destruction, when an entire building facade collapses onto him. The open attic window fits neatly around Keaton's body as it falls, coming within inches of flattening him. (Keaton had performed a similar, though smaller scale, stunt eight years earlier in the short film One Week). Keaton did the stunt himself with a real building section and no trickery. It has been claimed that if he had stood just inches off the correct spot, Keaton would have been seriously injured or killed. Keaton's third wife Eleanor suggested that he took such risks due to despair over financial problems, his failing first marriage, and the imminent loss of his filmmaking independence. Evidence that Keaton was suicidal, however, is scant and he was known throughout his career for doing dangerous stunts, including a fall from a railroad water tower tube in 1924's Sherlock, Jr. in which his neck was actually fractured when he hit the rail below.

The stunt has been re-created several times on film and television, though usually with facades made from lighter materials. One example is the 1991 MacGyver episode "Deadly Silents". Legendary Hong Kong film star Jackie Chan has often cited Keaton's acrobatics—and this stunt in particular—as one of his primary influences.

It is claimed that an early version of the film showed the perpetually stone-faced Keaton with a wide grin during the final scene and that the gag tested very poorly and was cut. No footage of the scene is known to have survived and the story may be apocryphyl as the final scene could only have been shot once due to the elaborate set-up required for the falling building.

It is one of the few Keaton films to reference his fame. At the time of filming, he had stopped wearing his trademark pork pie hat with a short flat crown. During an early scene in which his character tries on various hats (something that was copied several times in other films), he tries on several pork pie hats similar to the one he generally wore, but with higher crowns or wider brims or of slightly different colors. The character briefly has the trademark cap set on his head, but quickly rejects it, tossing it away.