Keaton ended up moving to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he made one last film in his trademark style, The Cameraman, and Spite Marriage, before his creative control was taken away by the studio.

The film, named after Arthur Collins's popular 1911 recording of the 1910 song "Steamboat Bill," also featured Ernest Torrence, Marion Byron, and Tom Lewis.

[a] William "Steamboat Bill" Canfield is the owner and captain of a paddle steamer, the Stonewall Jackson, that has seen better days.

Canfield meets Bill Jr. at the train station, but is deeply disappointed with his slight, awkward son, who is wearing a foppish beret and has a pencil moustache and a ukulele.

As he makes his way through the town, a building front falls all around him as an unbroken facade, but Bill Jr. is untouched due to a fortunately placed open window.

[1] Keaton also spent an additional $25,000 for the cyclone scene, which included breakaway street sets and six powerful Liberty-motor wind machines.

An open attic window fits neatly around Keaton's body as the structure falls, saving him from injury.

He had performed a similar, though less elaborate, stunt in his earlier short films Back Stage (1919) and One Week (1920).

[4] Evidence that Keaton was suicidal is scant—he was known throughout his career for performing dangerous stunts independent of any difficulties in his personal life, including a fall from a railroad water tower tube in 1924's Sherlock Jr. in which his neck was fractured.

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 a series of hats (something that was copied several times in other films), a clothing salesman briefly puts the trademark cap on his head, but he quickly rejects it, tossing it away.

[13] The film likely inspired the title of Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie (1928), which was released six months later and is considered the debut of Mickey Mouse.

The famous falling house stunt has been re-created several times on film and television (although with lighter materials and more contemporary safety measures in place) including the 1975 The Goodies episode "The Movies," the 1991 MacGyver episode "Deadly Silents," Jackie Chan's Project A Part II, the 2004 Arrested Development episode "The One Where They Build a House" (performed by the show's character named Buster), Al Yankovic's music video Amish Paradise (cross-referencing Peter Weir's 1985 film Witness), the 2006 comedy film Jackass Number Two, an Australian home insurance TV advertisement in 2021, and episode 7 in the first season of Lucha Underground, with a ladder.