Keaton's addiction to his scrupulously well-made plots grew out of his awareness that the most astonishing comic invention demands the most conventional of dramatic contexts. But as this awareness apparently intensified over the years, it also began to threaten to limit his work. In Seven Chances (1925) and Battling Butler (1926) the plot exacts too much of our attention, repeatedly subduing Buster to its complex needs, cheating us of occasions to watch the Keaton body at work. (p. 244)

In The General (1926) Keaton has conquered the problem with a success no one could have anticipated. Here the plot attains a Euclidean harmony of shape even as it forces its protagonist again and again to explore the very limits of his own physical resourcefulness; the tension between the demands of the action and the possibilities of the actor is flawlessly maintained over eight reels. So it is, perhaps, that the succeeding film, College (1927), is the most nearly episodic of the major Keaton features. Perfection of form, attained in The General, no longer seems a challenge. Yes, even in College the familiar narrative framework is present: the given situation demands a hero but instead gets a Buster; a Buster under pressure finally explodes into a hero unparalleled and so settles the situation. But the narrative framework is present as if only to permit discrete and self-contained illustrations of Keaton's bodily pyrotechnics, and the nature of these illustrations is fixed more nearly by the range of extracurricular activities college students may most likely pursue (athletics, part-time jobs) than by any internal demands of narrative sequence: whether a soda-jerk sequence will precede or follow this or that demonstration of virtuoso athletic incompetence is now determined mainly by Keaton's sense of how best to space his laughs.

[Steamboat Bill, Jr.] offers neither the narrative tautness of The General nor the comfortable narrative looseness of College; it is the work of a maker of comedies once again at peace with his chosen conventions. Because the protagonist is Buster, his father, seeing the long-absent son of his dreams return from the East in the person of an effete runt, will instantly withdraw his love. His girl will turn out to be the daughter of his father's rival steamboat operator. His home town on the Mississippi will prove a place where all his New England college refinements will seem a nasty joke either on his relations or on himself. And then, the pattern of ruination being as ineluctably logical in Steamboat Bill as in King Lear, his home town will be physically destroyed by a terrible storm. Since, however, he inhabits a world without reason, he will manage to rescue from the subsequent flood everyone who counts in the plot. Father and child, swain and beloved, even sworn business enemies will be momentarily reconciled. In the last shot, capitalising on this instant of harmony, he will salvage a preacher floating past in order to have the hard-won peace certified by a marriage ceremony. So it is, so precisely, we feel, it must be, in a Keaton movie. One reward of Steamboat Bill is an entirely satisfactory sense of the sheer inevitability of its events.

If [Mack] Sennett liberated comedy from the fixed arena of the stage, Keaton, more than anyone else, took it upon himself to explore the implications of what Sennett had done, using the film frame to show what it must mean to operate in a world where danger lies not only within the frame but without, the world any single frame excludes but does not deny. The cyclone sequence of Steamboat Bill completes Keaton's explorations. (pp. 244-45)

From the beginning Keaton understood the range of comic possibilities of cinematic silence. Sometimes the joke is on Buster: a door unexpectedly slams shut, Buster jumps, we laugh—and we laugh all the harder when Buster is alone on the screen and it therefore appears to us that Buster alone in the universe has heard the frightening sound. At other times Keaton's emphasis is different. We laugh in The General when a weirdly beautiful monomaniac chops wood atop a train even as an enemy army, moving implacably to the right of the frame as the train moves implacably to the left, silently engulfs him. But here the joke turns on us. Though we offer excuses different from Buster's—he was (we guess) distracted by the roar of his engine and his own intentness on the job before him, while we were distracted by the silence of Keaton's medium—we have in a sense participated in his error: at best we may have heard a piano in a movie theatre playing martial music, but like Buster himself we have surely failed to hear an army….

Though there seems little truth to the easy assumption that the imagery of the great films of the 1920s is the function of their want of words …, with Keaton silence and expressiveness of image do seem part of a single ontological condition. We can't know how Keaton's visual style would have been affected by sound had he enjoyed in the 1930s the freedom that was his a decade before. But we can see that Steamboat Bill, again like The Cameraman, displays a mastery of mise-en-cadre which no other comedies have equalled. (p. 245)