Speak Easily

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day...and this one is painful.

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.

Parlor Bedroom and Bath

Parlor, Bedroom and Bath (Edward Sedgwick, 1931) M-G-M had a relative hit with their first talkie featuring Buster Keaton (Free and Easy), but, artistically, it was an uncomfortable stretch for the versatile comedian-film-maker. His next film, also directed by Edward Sedgwick (and Keaton) hewed a bit closer to Keaton's classic style, depending less on verbal jokes and more on sight-gags and physical humor.

Keaton, this time, plays Reginald Irving, a humble flyer-hanger ("a sign-tacker" as he describes it), who, while putting up bills around the palatial Embrey estate (which is actually Keaton's own sprawling Hollywood house—way to double-dip on the budget, there, Joe) is struck with good fortune...when he is hit by a car. He is immediately rushed inside the house where his hosts, the Embrey sisters, see to all his recuperating needs. 

What Reginald doesn't realize is that he is convalescing in a hornet's nest: younger sister Ginny (Sally Eilers) wants to marry Jeffrey Haywood (Reginald Denny), but won't because her older sister Angelica (Dorothy Christy) hasn't married yet and her tastes are so discriminating that such a happy occasion isn't going to happen anytime soon. This is frustrating to Ginny and Jeffrey, so he takes matters into his own scheming hands—he tells the stricken Reginald, who is noticeably enamored of Angelica, that she has a crush on her crushed guest, then tells Angelica that Reginald is actually "Reggie" Irving, international playboy and breaker of hearts, whose decision to leave Europe has left the divorce lawyers there in tears. The idea is to hook them up, leaving the bridal path clear for he and Ginny.

Of course, the best of plans and the course of love, even one wholly fabricated, can never run smoothly...especially in a Keaton movie. Pretty soon, the conniving Jeffrey sends a bevy of previously unknown women to his room to fuss over him, making Angelica very jealous and more determined to have "Reggie" for herself. While Jeffrey whips up a publicity campaign of Reggie's exploits in the local papers with gossip columnist Polly Hathaway (Charlotte Greenwood), things accelerate and soon he and Angelica are engaged.

It's rife with people being caught in compromising positions and awkward postures, as well as a stunning sight gag involving trains—recycled from one of Keaton's silent pictures, but no less spectacular for it, an extended prat-fall rondelay with a slippery hotel lobby, and a final third confined to a single hotel room where all manner of absurd and risque behavior ensues. It's a return to form for Keaton, who manages to invest his inventive energy to a film that still manages to talk all the way through it.

Special mention should be made of Keaton's female co-stars who subject themselves to very unglamorous stunt work, but especially to the ungainly Greenwood, who manages to match Keaton for bizarre behavior step by mis-step.

Free and Easy (1930)

Free and Easy (Ed Sedgwick/Buster Keaton, 1930) Gosh, this is a tough one to write and I've been avoiding it for over a year as it is just too depressing. Free and Easy was a couple of films into Buster Keaton's new contract with M-G-M after buying his Keaton Studios, his first "talking" picture, and the first attempt by the studio to "shoe-horn" him into a star of the M-G-M caliber. 

And...they put him into a musical. After all, when something is successful, do something completely different and expect the same results. For all of Irving Thalberg's reputation of being a movie "genius," his work to "improve" Buster Keaton shows him to be not only fallible, but thuddingly so. Of all the pratfalls Keaton took, this one is the most painful to watch...because it's not under his own power.

In Free and Easy, Keaton plays Elmer Butts, a gas station attendant, who seeks to be the manager and very unlikely paramour of Elvira Plunkett (Anita Page), winner of the Gopher City Kansas beauty pageant, who is travelling to Hollywood to seek fame and fortune and/or a movie contract. Along for the ride, chaperoning, is Elvira's indomitable mother (Trixie Friganza) who thinks Elmer is a sap and is in no way shy of expressing that thought...or any other. But, Elmer is smitten, and after nearly being left behind by the train, finds himself perpetually frustrated trying to talk to Elvira.

The description makes it sound like a typical Keaton script, but, this time it's with sound, and immediately, you sense a problem: the timing's off. Comedy has a rhythm and its timing is critical in order to produce a laugh. The hi-jinx getting on the train in the opening scenes all try to play for big laughs, but come up short, and they stutter as the physical comedy that, before, propelled a Keaton comedy is replaced by broad dialogue. The film will improve the ratio a bit as it goes along, but, initially, it's a bit of a shock, especially when compared to the momentum of Keaton's silent's, which were cut to the action, not to the dialogue.

There must always be a rival for the girl's affections in a Keaton film, and it arrives early in the form of a studio contract player named Larry Mitchell (Robert Montgomery in only his 6th on-screen role), who is suave, debonair, and a bit of a cad. He convinces Elvira that he can do great things for her with his contacts in Hollywood, and it may be only a ruse to seduce her (the film is pre-Code, so you could get away with things like that), which puts us clearly on Team Keaton. Even as he bumbles his way through trying to connect with Elvira—he drives her and Mom to a big Hollywood premiere only to not be able to attend with her himself because he can't find a parking space—one senses a change in character under the mis-direction of MGM. Keaton always played something of a rube, but he was always a resourceful one, practically willing himself to get out of predicaments; how he would extricate himself out was always part of the surprise and part of the charm of his work.

He, he's merely hapless—a Kansian lost in the glitter and absurdity of Hollywood (ironically, Keaton actually WAS from Kansas). He's out of his depth in all the shallowness, a decent-enough fellow in an environment where glitz and glamour are what is valued. The conceit of the film is that of What Price, Hollywood (to be filmed two years later)—that Page's Elvira gets to Hollywood where she decides that what she wants is stability, and it is actually the unsophisticated Elmer who gets a Hollywood contract, getting something he doesn't really want, but losing what he does. Career and love go on parallel tracks of desire, but never in the same direction.

Elmer goes skulking around the MGM lot trying to find Elvira while trying to avoid studio security, screwing up shots, destroying sets, and being a typical bull in a china-shop, when he stumbles into an audition with director Fred Niblo—Free and Easy is full of cameo's by MGM stars and directors that it almost feels like a presentation to its board of directors—who can't seem to get a decent line reading of "Woe is me, the Queen has swooned!" Despite the difficulties with lines, he nevertheless manages to get a featured musical-comedy role—improbably playing against Elvira's mother!—in a large production that's run like a Broadway show—even though it's a movie, it's all presented as if they do it in one amazing shot, without the necessity of editing away (except in the magical way that MGM musicals do).

It's a testament to Keaton's talent that he even brings the musical number off...despite his low bass voice, being "boxed" away for a part of the number, and being "Peter Panned" around on ropes in a weird puppet dance (one could "read" something into that as a comment of the studio's treatment of him, but we'll let that go).

Perhaps we should leave that for the ending, with a successful Elmer in sad clown make-up, bravely keeping the show going on, while holding back tears for his lost lady-love. Sentimentality was never a strong suit for Keaton—that's in Chaplin's bag of manipulations—he would always undercut it with a joke and move on, but, here, the filmmakers linger on the pathos...and it just...feels ...wrong. Sad, yes, but not in the way it's intended. Sad because it's a great comic artist—nay, genius—being misused in a way that he never would have planned at his own studio. But, Keaton was no longer considered an artist, but  just a commodity. And if MGM saw him as a "fall-guy," rather than as a comedian, then he would take the fall. And for a comedy called Free and Easy, that's a tragedy.

Free and Easy did make money, though, which only encouraged MGM to continue their folly. Keaton's next movie, though, would see a return of his comic snap.

Spite Marriage

Spite Marriage (Edward Sedgwick, Buster Keaton, 1929) Buster Keaton's second film for M-G-M was supposed to be a full sound film, but was made silent—sound (and a weakening of Keaton's control in the production) would come with his next film Free and Easy.

Ingenue Trilby Drew (the very game Dorothy Sebastian) is the toast of Broadway in her latest play "Carolina" but off-stage she's being shadowed by a diminutive well-tailored suitor. He's there at functions for her on the edges of crowds, a horse-ride in the park has him waiting by the road unsteadily simultaneously trying to tip his hat and keep control of his horse.

He is Elmer (Buster Keaton), a "presser" at a local cleaners, borrowing the fine clothes of his clientele to make a good impression and then sticking them back on the hanger for pick-up, pocketing the fee rather than putting it in the cash register, so that he can live in the manner to which his beloved is accustomed.

That includes going to every evening performance of "Carolina" where he sits in the front row and pines and applauds every entrance and exit...even taking advantage of a case of mistaken identity to appear as an extra, just to be that much closer to her. Trilby finds Elmer a nuisance (he is, after all, a stalker), but when her co-star begins stepping out with another woman, Trilby finds him useful. He is, after all, always within arm's reach.

Just to stick the knife in a little deeper, she decides to marry the overwhelmed and overawed Elmer. But, it can't come to any good, and after two unconsummated wedding nights, Trilby's manager tells Elmer that he must leave so that Trilby can save face, sue for divorce and salvage her career. Elmer, heart-broken, decides to leave and, circumstances being what they are in a Keaton comedy, he finds himself on the very same private yacht that Trilby is on to get away from the publicity.

Keaton, a girl, and a boat. Never a good combination if you want a restful sea cruise. Some of it might seem familiar if you've seen The Navigator, but there's a funny sequence when Keaton is below in the engine room, when a porthole opens and water starts gushing in.

It is interesting to watch this last silent film of Keaton's. You get the impression he's slowing down a little—not in his speed, he still runs like a bat out of Hell. It seems like the chances he takes are a bit more careful, like he was being pressured from M-G-M to do a little less stunt-work to protect their investment (he was 34 at the time of Spite Marriage).

I wanted to talk about this in the post on Free and Easy (which will be someday), but it's more appropriate to talk about this now. This is probably the last film where Keaton seems like a young man, naive and inviting of the audience's sympathy and support. He seems like a moon-calf, a young innocent far less sophisticated than the world of sharps and authority figures who will pursue, take advantage of, and, at times, overwhelm him.

And it's because he has no voice. With his next film, he will protest his treatment in his low gravelly, basso voice, which makes him seem older, but not wiser, and so his protestations have a whiny, helpless quality, which the deeper voice works against. Keaton's characters will seem less innocent and more pathetic, inviting audience scorn, rather than sympathy (this will become especially true with Free and Easy, showing that M-G-M had absolutely no idea what to do with him, once they sought to "improve" him, and tried to make him fit the mold of the day. Or what they thought was the mold of the day—a cookie-cutter template to improve returns. What works is for Keaton to be mute, his "stone-face" betraying little emotion, until he up and hits somebody in the face, which shocks and provokes a laugh. With the silent movie format, he is surprising, which is the essence of comedy; if he tells you how he's feeling, his character comes across as a complainer and a grouchy complainer at that.

No, Keaton is better and more effective silent, and Spite Marriage will be the last full-length example of just how effective that formula could be.

The Cameraman (1928)

The Cameraman (Edward Sedgwick, Buster Keaton, 1928) The first film of Keaton's production deal with M-G-M (which would ultimately prove disastrous for the filmmaker). Believed lost until a print was found in Paris in 1968, it was co-directed by Keaton (who went without credit) and Edward Sedgwick (an M-G-M regular, who is best known for "discovering" Lucille Ball, a debt she re-paid by hiring Sedgwick as a producer for her company, Desilu). Keaton's control over his movies was slightly less than at his own studio, but he managed to retain his producer function, while giving up the "director" credit. Ultimately, though, he would lose management of business decisions to the studio, who would embark on a misguided effort to change the kind of performer Keaton was most popular as. The film of The Cameraman is an odd little prophecy of what would come later in Keaton's career.

Keaton plays "Buster," a humble tintype photographer ("they make excellent ash-trays!"), scraping together a meager living photographing interested passers-by on the streets of New York. While photographing an attractive woman (Marceline Day), the two are besieged by a crowd of people—a big event is happening on the street and they are crushed by innumerable rubber-neckers trying to get a glimpse of what's going on. This includes a newsreel photographer from M-G-M (meta reinforcement), who the woman, Sally, pays a lot of attention to.

Through the eyes of love, Buster sees the future and it is not seen in tintypes. After being rejected by M-G-M Newsreels (where Sally is the receptionist, hence her interest), he takes his savings from his old technology (tellingly nearly destroying his apartment in the meantime) to buy a newfangled cranking movie camera and prove his worth.

He does some testing, both of his equipment and with Sally, taking her on a date around the city. The first doesn't go too well. Being inexperienced, Buster makes a lot of mistakes, his footage being shaky, over-and double-exposed, and useless, which he only discovers when he screens his footage for the Newsreel brass. The other photographers he'd be competing with have a high old time hooting at his rookie mistakes, while the Boss simply tells him he's no good and won't consider hiring him.

Sally, however, takes pity on the hapless schnook and agrees to go out with him when her planned Sunday date falls through. The sequence begins with an elaborate crane shot that moves up and down the stairwell of Keaton's apartment house as he tries to get time on a shared phone in order to talk to Sally. When she agrees to see him, he's so excited that he runs to her boarding-house arriving there before she can hang up the phone.

The date is a battle of logistics: it seems all of New York is in cahoots to separate Buster from Sally and he must come up with unique and frequently dangerous ways for them to be together. This violation of space is a running gag throughout their date, where folks just impose their will on Buster, and he must come up with ways to regain it, change it, or accommodate it. The most bizarre of these is when he must share his cramped changing room at a public pool with a man (Edward Brophy, the film's unit manager) who insists on occupying the same room—the confusion of clothes and limbs (in one extended take, it should be noted) is hilarious, frenzied and unorganized in an un-choreographed awkward tangle.

The date (such as it is) does not go very well, with the intervention of Buster's news-reeling rival (Harold Goodwin) for Sally's affections driving her home in a torrential down-pour with Buster exposed to the elements in the car's rumble-seat.

But, once again, she takes pity on him and gives him a choice assignment when rumors of a skirmish at a Chinatown celebration reaches her desk. She gives Buster the assignment, and he barely survives being shot, run-over, and arrested while recording the event. Although the footage is spectacular, Buster has nothing to show for it, but a three foot roll of film. He evidently forgot to load the camera.

Well, that's how it appears, anyway. In the midst of the film, Buster somehow manages to acquire a hurdy-gurdy monkey who has more than a monkey's paw in having Buster come away with the plum assignment empty-handed. It should be noted that the on-screen chemistry between Keaton and the monkey is amazing, rivaling the affection between Keaton's character and Sally. Perhaps, the primate found in Keaton a fellow-acrobat and relentless performer.

In one of their attempts to inject formula into Keaton's film, the "real" M-G-M brass insisted that a shot of Keaton smiling be part of the end, but preview audiences expressed a dislike for it and it was taken out. It presaged the studio's forthcoming ideas on how to "improve" Keaton's likability to audiences, forcing him to do "talkies" and even sing when they moved into sound pictures. The Cameraman, with its story of a photographer forced to change, uncomfortably, with the times, is a bit of a reflection of Keaton's uneasy relationship with the studio, which would rapidly deteriorate.

It was, however, added to the National Film Registry in 2005 for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Keaton remembered his move to M-G-M as "the worst mistake of my career."

* Tintype photography still exists, but the process takes 10 minutes per picture and modern life just can't wait that long. But, photographer Victoria Will still makes tintypes, which have the weird effect of looking like someone has been sent back in time.