Steamboat Bill, Jr. Trivia Quiz

Answer: It's Mother's Day and just about all the men are wearing white carnations.

Willie's plan goes doubly awry as he loses his own carnation.

Big, burly Bill is thrilled at the idea of seeing Willie all grown up. "I'll bet he's bigger'n me," he grins to his first (and only) mate. But Bill is in for some disappointments on more than one score.

Bill Sr. is played by Ernest Torrence, a towering 6'4" actor from Scotland, who made it unscathed through the transition to sound, only to have his life cut short in 1933 from complications of emergency surgery.

Answer: He dances gaily while playing his ukulele.

Bill's horror when he realizes that the tiny dandy is his son amuses his first mate enormously. Bill warns him, "If you say what you're thinking I'll strangle you!" But Willie's dance wasn't as inexplicable as it seemed to his father. He had only been trying to comfort a crying baby.

Keaton himself was an accomplished ukulele player.

Answer: Willie's school sweetheart intervenes and picks his clothes out for him.

Willie encounters Kitty (Marion Byron) at the barber shop. When she sees Willie at the clothing store she rushes in and gets him outfitted in a jaunty uniform, totally unfit for service aboard the dilapidated Stonewall Jackson. As Bill watches his effete son approach, his first mate hands him a pistol and tells him, "No jury would convict you."

Answer: He makes Willie's hand into a fist and uses it to punch King's man.

The whole shoving match starts when King's man shoves Buster off the King and onto the Stonewall Jackson. Bill, outraged at seeing his son manhandled, rushes down and shoves Willie back aboard the King. Back and forth poor Willie goes, until he tumbles and drags King's man with him.

Answer: He accidentally knocks King into the river.

Willie accidentally starts the boat up twice, bumping into the King and knocking the passengers off their feet -- and King into the river. When Bill sees this he laughs and gives his son a manly hug, along with a chew of tobacco which the hapless Willie accidentally swallows.

We only see the cat briefly, later, when the mate appears on deck to toss it aside for the night. Willie has yet to fight back against anybody. It's Bill who gets pugnacious when Willie is treated roughly at anybody else's hands.

Answer: Yes

Willie climbs aboard and manages to sneak through a door, but in spite of his best efforts -- which leave him, Kitty's father, and one of King's men drenched in the river -- Willie never gets to his romantic rendezvous. But his father sees him climbing aboard the King and is fed up. He's sending his son back to Boston.

Answer: He plans to smuggle escape tools to his father in a loaf of bread.

It's really unfair that Bill gets locked up, since he had only confronted King and torn up a notice condemning the Stonewall Jackson. King threw a rock at Bill, breaking a window. But King has money and connections, so it's Bill who gets hauled off. And the dancing fingers routine Willie does to try to convey to Bill the purpose of the bread loaf is one of the most striking and memorable bits in the film.

The close-up shot of Willie handling the money and ticket was shot with a hand double; you can spot the intact right index fingertip and know those aren't Keaton's hands.

Answer: He is stunned when a man jumps out a window and lands on the bed he is hiding under.

Willie and his bed are blown down the street. When the bed stops briefly in front of the building, Willie rolls underneath, only to be stunned as a man went leaping from the open upstairs window onto Willie's bed. The bed blows away in the storm, and Willie staggers to his feet. The wall comes crashing down, leaving Willie standing in the open upstairs window.

The wall was a real wall of a real house; Keaton's set designer, Fred Gabourie, and his team had cut it loose from the house and hinged it at the bottom. Keaton's marks were two nails driven into the ground to plant his heels on. He had inches to spare on each side. His credited director was off in a corner, praying. Most of his crew refused to watch. His cameraman cranked with his eyes closed. And Keaton, who had just been told the day before that he was losing his studio, later recalled standing beneath that two-ton wall as it came down and not caring if it crushed him or not.

Keaton follows up the crashing wall with a scene in a wrecked theater that echoed events from his childhood in vaudeville, including getting scared senseless by a seemingly incarnate ventriloquist's dummy.

Answer: She's clinging to a house that's floating down the river.

Willie uses an anchor as a grappling hook to snag the house as it's floating past. He crosses on the rope, grabs Kitty (who nearly strangles him with her embraces), and starts back with her. They fall into the river, but Willie manages to get both of them onto the Stonewall Jackson safely.

Since 16-year-old Marion Byron, who played Kitty, couldn't swim, Keaton used his sister, Louise, as a stunt double in the water scenes. The water was cold, and the crew often fished the Keaton siblings out of the river to warm them with blankets and brandy.

Answer: To rescue a preacher

Everybody is reconciled, and the preacher is there. It's time for a wedding!

Keaton had originally planned a flood for his finale, but due to a deadly flood on the Mississippi, Keaton's producers insisted that the cataclysm be changed. Keaton chose a cyclone -- renting six enormous and powerful wind machines to blow him about -- and managed to keep many of his flood gags by transferring them to the river.