Speak Easily (Edward Sedgwick, 1932) As regular readers—the two of you—know, I'm a big fan of Buster Keaton, and when you see his films and trace his career, you come to a point of heart-break. That's when he sold his studio to M-G-M (bad business advice from his brother-in-law) and the studio's geniuses, with the best of intentions and the worst of results, destroyed his career.
For all the talk of Irving Thalberg as a "boy-genius" at Metro, he was abysmally out of his depth with comedy, as his work with Keaton and The Marx Brothers show. The Marx Brothers M-G-M films are still watchable, but a step below what they were achieving at the end of their run for Paramount. Keaton, however, went to M-G-M at the top of his game as a silent comedian/actor/director and very shortly, was down-graded to a has-been, and regarded a broken relic in the new, better world of "Talking Pictures."
Keaton plays Professor Post, a rather idiosyncratic Classics professor at Potts College, who has "never enjoyed life." Post has a good reason for that—money. After 12 years of teaching, he has saved $4,564.32—which he is saving for a rainy day. He's told "Poor Professor Pervison said that and it rained the day of his funeral." The guy who says that decides (for his own good) to trick Potts into thinking he's inherited $750,000, the news of which compels Post to walk away from his teaching to see the world.
First stop is a train station for a trip to New York, where he encounters a dance troupe and a dancer named Pansy Peets (Ruth Selwyn), with whom he becomes so infatuated that complications ensue and he is saved from being kicked off the train by Jimmy Dodge (Jimmy Durante), a piano player/comedian with the troupe. Post makes it all the way to the town of Fish's Switch, where in his protracted good-byes to the troupe (who are getting off), he misses getting back on the train for the rest of his journey.
There's nothing left for him to do but go to the burg's lone hotel—where the dance troupe is staying—and catch their show. He enjoys it enough to tell them he'll invest and work as producer—still thinking that $750,000 is real—and to stay close to Pansy.
The complications are numerous—including a new member of the troupe (Thelma Todd), with intentions to be the star of the show and to seduce Post—leading up to issues with contractors who want to get paid, possible police action, and a disastrous opening night in which Post gets caught up in a spinning back-drop while the stage-crew run around trying to save him.
Durante is there to keep the soundtrack full and fast—something Keaton's prevaricating professor can't do—and except for a sequence in which Keaton and Todd get drunk resulting in a watered-down version of earlier film's sequences in which the two become crash-test-dummies for a couch is the only—and Keatonesque—highlight.
Keaton, at his best—or even at his middling best—played an Everyman against Nature, the nature of people or against Nature itself (even if it was merely the laws of physics). Speak Easily reduced him from being a character to whom the audience could relate to merely being a prop.
No comments:
Post a Comment