Our Hospitality was Keaton’s first feature as a director, a comedy about a family feud in which a guest could not be harmed under his host’s roof.
Our Hospitality was released in 1923, directed by Keaton and John G. Blystone. It was set in the 1830s, in the American South, where two families, the McKays and the Canfields, were locked in a feud. Keaton played Willie McKay, a young man raised in New York who returned to his birthplace to claim his inheritance, unaware that the Canfields were waiting to kill him.
The film’s comedy came from a rule of Southern hospitality: a guest could not be harmed while he was under his host’s roof. Willie, who fell in love with Virginia Canfield, played by Natalie Talmadge, stayed in the Canfield house as a guest, and his hosts were forced to be polite to him while they plotted his death. The train journey that opened the film, with its old locomotive and comic mishaps, was one of Keaton’s most carefully staged sequences.
Our Hospitality showed that Keaton could sustain a feature film, not only a short. Its period detail, its stunts and its clever use of a simple rule made it a success, and it remains one of the most enjoyable of his early features.