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.

Sherlock Holmes (1922)

Sherlock Holmes (Albert Parker, 1922) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's great detective (consulting) given the silent treatment with John Barrymore in the title role, based on the William Gillette play (which Gillette re-wrote after not liking Conan Doyle's original—and after reading Gillette's version, Doyle agreed!) that was the defining presentation of the character for folks who had never read the early stories.  

First things first, Barrymore is great, looking the very image of Holmes as seen in the original Sidney Paget drawings that accompanied the first publication of the cases in The Strand Magazine.  His Holmes is cunning, contemplative and very rarely wears a deerstalker. The story presents a complicated tale (actually several mysteries in one) spanning years of evil deeds perpetrated by Holmes' nemesis, Professor Moriarty (played by an actor with the wonderful name of Gustav von Seyffertitz) on the more young, innocent members of British society (including a young William Powell—this was his first film).  It's up to Holmes (and to a much lesser extent, Roland Young's Watson) to get to the bottom of the case.

Powell and Barrymore in the '22 Sherlock Holmes

It's based primarily on the first Holmes story "A Scandal in Bohemia" (which presents Holmes in full flower and deals with the one opponent he could not best and whom he came to admire, Irene Adler. But that's all changed here. There's no Adler, but instead the Faulkner sisters, both of whom Holmes becomes infatuated with, first in his youth at the the time of his first encounter with Moriarty, and later, after the one's sister's death, and the other sister's possession of her love letters that could result in scandal and repercussions for a European King's reign. But, it is Moriarty and his network of thugs and assassins that want to seize the letters. The extant Faulkner sister is merely keeping them hidden. And Moriarty is set on both getting the letters and assassinating Holmes, the latter done in rather melodramatic ways, luring him into a trap, or shooting him at 221B Baker Street.  

It's a silent film, the particulars told in title cards, which is problematic as Holmes, once coerced to reveal the methodology of his deductions, can be a verbose creature. So it falls on the title card authors to show the process in a kind of dense short-hand. Those moments are few and far between.  Mostly, it's standard melodramatic fare, without the Doyle back-stories that tie everything together, and explain the gears that set the whole thing in motion (This is done at the beginning and inserting Holmes into it). It's all pretty surface-stuff, befitting a stage presentation (although Parker manages to cross the Victorian era and motor car era in his production design), with Barrymore's performance—he was 40 at the time— breaking the silent tradition by being more interior, more cerebral, setting Holmes' detective apart from the usual over-emoting that was the tradition and chief weapon in communicating emotions during the silents.

Granada's Holmes, Jeremy Brett, used to talk about a conversation he'd had with Robert Stephens, who played the role in Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, where Stephens commented "There's nothing there inside the character, just a big empty space that you must fill any way you can." Essentially, he's right. There are lots of Sherlock's who are bland and impenetrable—in fact, the BBC had a rough time with a revolving door of actors who couldn't live up to Brett's version, even when the actor was deathly ill, and didn't until the character was revamped in modern times and played by Benedict Cumberbatch. A "silent" Holmes makes the portrayal even tougher to pull off, as Holmes' theatricality is easiest portrayed with his voice and phrasings, weapons not available in silent films. But Barrymore still manages to make a memorable Holmes, if slightly diluted by a tendency to become romantically involved with his clients. Gillette did so in his play to win audiences and make Holmes a more romantic hero. And although it's slightly unnerving to see, Barrymore makes it acceptable.

Next Saturday: The elementary Sherlock Holmes.