The Paleface

A taciturn butterfly-sniper of slapstick—equal parts pilgrim and prankster—drifts into a dust-caked frontier where asphalt dreams ooze beneath moccasins. Keaton’s whey-faced drifter, dubbed ‘Friendless’ on the cast sheet but mythic in every bone, is auctioned off as husband to a Pawnee chieftain’s daughter (Fox) to keep her tribe’s oil-rich flats from being bled dry by silk-hatted speculators. What follows is a carnival of contraptions: a trainload of cattle that stampede inside passenger cars, a rain of bullets that our hero sidesteps like a matador of misfortune, a medicine-show wagon that folds into a Swiss-army fortress, and a climactic buffalo avalanche that becomes both siege engine and sacred reckoning. Through pratfalls that bruise the soul and sight-gags that glow with metaphysics, the film refracts Manifest Destiny into a cracked kaleidoscope—land theft as vaudeville, genocide as gag reel—until the paleface clown, daubed in tribal paint, trades his last cartridge for a prayer and rewrites the Western myth in smoke and semaphore.