Pre-Code Parade: DOUGHBOYS (1930)

Buster Keaton reportedly liked Doughboys, his second talking feature, the best of his pictures for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Keaton fans realize that this isn't saying much, but the film apparently appealed to Buster's nostalgia for his time entertaining the troops in Europe. It was one of a cycle of war comedies that included Harry Langdon's A Soldier's Plaything, Wheeler and Woolsey's Half Shot at Sunrise and Anybody's War, featuring the blackface team of Moran and Mack. These films were contemporaries of All Quiet on the Western Front, and their advertising could play, as the newspaper ad shown here did, on the already-famous title. Whatever personal meaning Doughboys had for Keaton, there's really little to distinguish it, apart from the military setting, from his soul-crushing output under Metro's creative control. It's the talkie debut of Keaton's millionaire persona -- like Harold Lloyd, he could play any social class, at least in silent film, as each film required. At the same time, however, Keaton is the pathetic "Elmer" character Metro had burdened him with since his last silent feature, Spite Marriage. In fact, there's little consistency in Keaton's performance. He tries to put on airs appropriate to Elmer Stuyvesant's class in some scenes, but whenever he tries to court Mary, the girl of the picture (Sally Eilers), he comes across as more pathetically awkward than a wealthy man probably should have been. In those courting scenes -- for starters, Elmer awaits Mary's departure from work every afternoon, attended by his butler and chauffeur, only to be rebuffed daily -- he resembles a drunk vaguely recalling some of Langdon's baby-man shtick. Even at his most aristocratic, Keaton is obliged to speak demoralizing joke-book dialogue. Mistakenly enlisting for the Great War, Elmer is asked where he was born, and of course says it was in a hospital. "Were you sick?" the recruiting officer asks sarcastically, and of course Elmer answers that he can't remember exactly because he was very young at the time. From there, it's standard service-comedy stuff. Keaton is supported by more vocally-interesting performers, including ukulele-strumming Cliff Edwards as his eventual buddy and Edward Brophy as a drill instructor and romantic rival for ambulance-driver Mary. With his gruff yet high-pitched voice, the bloodthirsty and often apoplectic Brophy nearly steals the picture from Keaton, whose physical comedy here is mostly uninspired, howevermuch he enjoyed the material.

Things do pick up a little when the awkward squad reaches Europe. One of the intended highlights is a show put on by the troops in which some of the performers, including Elmer, hit the stage in drag. The joke is that Elmer's out of sync with the other "ladies," and that's about it, as if Keaton's mere awkwardness was supposed to be hilarious. Somewhat better is his performance, still in drag, in the dreaded Apache dance, but it's merely violent without the grace a silent Keaton might have lent the scene. My favorite bit is when Elmer blunders into a German trench, only to find his former butler (Arnold Korff) leading a band of starving but friendly troops. Tasked with taking prisoners, Elmer takes their orders for dinner -- they want all the stereotypical Teutonic favorites -- but gets involved in a final adventure with Mary and an unexploded shell before the war ends and the enemy can be fed. There's something dimly Keatonesque about Elmer and Mary's pathetic attempts to deactivate the shell, but it'll only make you think of what a Keaton with full creative control might have made of the war. The ending at least has some redeeming nastiness. Elmer has inherited the family business in peacetime and has installed his war buddies as directors, while hiring Brophy the drill instructor to be a humble janitor, but this scene of triumph is disrupted by the riveting at a nearby construction project, which sends all the veterans scampering for cover. I guess we don't laugh at such moments anymore, but in an M-G-M Keaton picture you take your laughs wherever you can.

Pre-Code Parade: SIDEWALKS OF NEW YORK (1931)

This was Buster Keaton's fourth talking feature and his sixth film for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. According to Wikipedia, it was the most popular film of his career, which could only convince M-G-M that they had done something right taking creative control of his work away from Keaton, though you wonder why, on the heels of such success, the studio decided that they needed to hang the albatross Jimmy Durante around Buster's neck for his next (and last) three Metro features. Sidewalks is a rare feature-length effort from director Jules White, and in fact he only co-directed it. White is most identified with the Three Stooges, but that didn't prepare me to see Keaton do the oath-taking courtroom bit ("Take off your hat!...Raise your right hand," etc.) immortalized by Curly Howard five years later in the White-produced Disorder in the Court. The sad part is that Curly did it better, and the bit was more appropriate for him. Keaton was playing the sort of clueless millionaire character he played often in silents (e.g. The Navigator) and while such a character may be unworldly he shouldn't be the sort of moron the swearing-in routine requires. In Sidewalks Keaton's character discovers that he is a slumlord when he investigates his minion's (Cliff Edwards) failure to collect rent. The local urchins have chased Edwards off the block and are in the midst of a baseball riot when Edwards returns with Keaton. Buster meets cute with leading lady Anita Page when she decks him with an authoritative looking haymaker for allegedly roughing up her little brother. Whenever I see The Broadway Melody I think Page looks like a lummox next to petite Bessie Love, even though Page is the glamour-girl of that film's sister act. Alongside Keaton she looks more ladylike yet it still seems plausible that she could beat him up. That Buster has a girlfriend who could fight his battles for him is an idea that has potential, but Page steps back to become a more conventional romantic lead as the plot proper kicks in. As with the Marx Bros. later, the brains at Metro felt that Keaton would be more lovable if he were shown helping other people. His mission here is to reform the neighborhood in general and Page's brother in particular by opening a gym where the boys can learn athletics and stay off the street. The boy has fallen in with gangsters and we must endure scenes starring the kid with Keaton nowhere in sight to keep the plot going. To impress the neighborhood Keaton must prove himself physically, but Page's KO isn't encouraging. Buster proves himself inept at combat sports and is humiliated by a Japanese kid who jiu-jitsus him all over the place. He's always learning, however, and in the climactic melee he uses the same moves on the lead gangster to help save the day. There's plenty of physical comedy for Keaton, but it's mostly pratfalls and brawling instead of the expansive chase scenes he's remembered for. There's also a botched amateur play, since Keaton on stage presumably had worked back in Spite Marriage, his final silent film. It's actually absurd enough to be amusing, particularly when a loaded gun is on stage with a bullet meant for Buster. Playing in drag, and obliged to die in the play, Buster is a fanatic trouper, determined to get in the line of fire no matter what efforts are made to divert the lethal shot. The scene doesn't really make sense -- why not fire the gun into the air and end the suspense? -- but it has a necessary ludicrousness that the rest of the picture lacks painfully. Keaton can't do much to redeem the material. He tries for a while to affect a more refined delivery for his posh character but his coarse speaking voice makes his once-effortless imposture unconvincing. Beyond that, he can do little but go through the limited motions Metro allowed him. The best that can be said about Sidewalks, sadly, is that far worse was yet to come.

Pre-Code Parade: WHAT! NO BEER? (1933)

This is career death: Buster Keaton's final film for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio that destroyed him. The legend is that the studio people thought they understood comedy better than the greatest physical comic of the silent era. The truth was that Keaton's big-budget spectaculars for United Artists, The General and Steamboat Bill Jr. -- had not been especially popular with their original audiences, so Metro may have felt it necessary to steer Keaton in another direction, just as they would do, more successfully to an extent, with the Marx Bros. a few years later. Keaton made two silents for M-G-M that are conceded to retain some of his old spark. But Keaton in talkies proved hopeless. His voice made it easy for Metro to reinvent the Buster persona as an utter moron, though he did at least once revive his naive millionaire character for them. Worse, it was thought necessary that he say funny things, though thanks to the scripts he rarely did. Keaton wasn't reluctant to talk, but his own ideas for sound comedy were thwarted consistently. His inclinations ran from the parodic to the absurd. His idea to save his career was to film an all-star parody of Grand Hotel -- he'd wanted in on Grand Hotel itself but Lionel Barrymore got the part he wanted -- but of course the studio nixed the idea. In frustration with both his career and his marriage, he drank. In What! No Beer? he is often obviously sozzled on screen. That film might drive anyone to drink, whether you had to perform in it or watch it.

Edward Sedgwick directed; he made all but one of Keaton's Metro pictures, and by now was as void of inspiration as his star. Throughout the picture there are moments that have the potential for humor that might have been realized by a healthier Keaton and his old collaborators. There's potential, believe it or not, in the idea that Elmer Butts, a taxidermist, keeps money stuffed in his various specimens. In better days, Keaton might have run with the idea of storing much more in the stuffed animals, or using them as furniture, utensils, etc. But here Sedgwick seems to have no idea of how to frame the action so it works as gags. You see the same sort of failure repeatedly. Buster is handcuffed to Jimmy Durante -- in the story as well as in his career at that point -- and is flung about as Durante gesticulates wildly protesting their innocence to a judge. At his best Keaton would have choreographed this business with care and ensured that his director would have shot it to get the most laughs out of his pratfalls. In the finished product Sedgwick cluelessly shoots Buster crashing about aimlessly, as if his main concern -- and there's probably no "if" to it -- had been to record Durante's malaprops and mugging. Even Durante can't do anything with one of the film's big set pieces; his and Buster's first attempt to brew beer at their new brewery. Durante is working from an old family recipe that's pathetically small in scale given their resources, and the gag is that he, Buster and their three helpers (including stuttering Roscoe Ates) still louse up the job. Sedgwick has a large brewery set to work with, and no idea, probably having no input in its construction, of how to work with it. The sort of workplace comedy that the Three Stooges could do in their sleep seems beyond anyone's ability here. There's lots of spraying people with water, with hose gags that must have seemed old to the Lumiere brothers in 1896, but nothing that rises to the level of a true sight gag. What! No Beer? is one of the most ineptly directed comedies you'll ever see, and as such it exposes mercilessly how badly Keaton had deteriorated in his five years at Metro.

The idea is that Elmer Butts wants to make a million dollars to impress a girl (Phyllis Barry) he met outside an anti-Prohibition rally, not realizing that she's a gangster's moll. In this inspired-by-imminent-events fantasy, Prohibition is doomed by a national referendum, after some clumsy pratfalls in collapsible voting booths, and the Durante character assumes that beer will be legal the very next day. He convinces Elmer that he can make his million by investing his $10,000 nest egg in a brewery, but when they finally brew a batch large enough to sell they're raided by the cops. They're spared jail time only because they've actually failed to brew proper beer, but once Ates gives them a formula for then-legal "near beer" they become pawns in a power struggle between two gangsters for the last days of the bootleg market. In a badly written and performed scene one of the gangsters (Edward Brophy) invades Elmer's office, only to be impressed by Elmer's newly-learned sales talk (Buster conveniently reads his lines from the book) into thinking that "the frozen-faced guy" is a business mastermind. This alliance makes Elmer the enemy of the rival gangster (John Miljan) whose moll is the very girl Buster pines for. She exploits this to get information (and $10,000) from Elmer in the Pre-Code era's lamest seduction sequence, but she later inexplicably falls for him for real. The alleged slapstick highlight of the film is Elmer's thwarting of a hit on him by accidentally unloading his beer barrels from his truck so that they roll downhill and wipe out his assailants. It's a feeble imitation of the boulder gags from Seven Chances with none of the payoffs. The real climax comes when Mijan takes over the brewery and forces Durante & Co to make real beer. Elmer escapes by having himself sealed in a barrel and rolled off the premises. He then gathers a mob by driving through town promising free beer at the brewery. A horde descends on the place, and in the confusion Elmer takes out Miljan with a drop kick to the ankles that is, sad to say, the high point of acrobatics in this Buster Keaton picture. In the end, our heroes open a legal beer garden (misspelled "Butt's") and in a rush for his autograph another mob strips Elmer to his underwear, while Durante promises the audience that beer is coming soon to a town near them. He can't help adding a "hotcha-cha" to that, and I can't help wanting to break a bottle (or a barrel) over his head.

To be fair, Durante seems almost desperately conscious of a need to fill the void created by Keaton's implosion, even if his efforts seem to further suffocate his colleague. He's trying to save the picture, but Jimmy Durante can only do the opposite with his maddeningly repetitive shtick and his dismal malaprops. Some people actually dig that type of humor, and I can only feel sorry for them. Again, had the film had a more competent director and a more engaged star a better balance may have been struck between the co-stars' styles. A scene at Durante's barber shop is another missed opportunity. He raves about the referendum while lathering Elmer's face and while impulsively gesticulating cranks the lever that raises and lowers the barber chair, as all the while a stoic, silent -- almost Keatonesque -- black man struggles to shine Elmer's shoes. You can see the pieces of a promising gag sequence laying about, but Sedgwick is barely capable of putting one block on top of another and the result is more disorganized flailing about. In Sedgwick's defense, there are signs of heavy editing in the 65 minute picture. Shots are cut abruptly, probably in at least some cases to cover some lapse of Keaton's. In one case, near the end of the seduction scene, Sedgwick sets up a pratfall gag, but we never see Keaton take the fall. Had it gotten so bad that Buster couldn't manage such a simple task? Watching this film, you can believe it. It's one of the most demoralizing hours of cinema you could subject yourself to, and though you may know that Keaton would bounce back eventually, if not to full creative flower than at least in the esteem of movie lovers, you may find that hard to believe after seeing What! No Beer? This is a film that lives down to its bad reputation and may even exceed it. For some, my saying this may be a dare to watch the movie, but it lacks the spectacle and pathos of a more ambitious train wreck as well as anything like the incoherent inspiration that makes some bad films highly entertaining. What! No Beer? is so bad that it's terrible; for fans of Keaton it's downright horrifying.

Now Playing: MARCH 12, 1933

Two films from last week are held over for a second week in Milwaukee, each claiming to be the biggest hit in the city. Let's look at the numbers, starting with "the big hit of Milwaukee."

But who is the Garden kidding with their feeble 22,000? For all I know it might have been all the theater could hold, but they could fill the place for an entire second week and still not equal the one-week take claimed by the Warner.

In any event, films don't get held over too often in 1933, so both shows can take a bow.

Now for a history lesson. Fans of Buster Keaton know all too well that by the end of his run with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer he was virtually overshadowed by co-star Jimmy Durante, a comic superficially more suited to talkies with his gravelly voice, his catchphrases and malapropisms. Well, the end is here. What! No Beer? opened in Milwaukee, the city that beer made famous (or something like that) over the weekend, and the newspaper build-up sends a mixed message about the relative standing of the co-stars.

Two days before opening, Keaton is top billed.

 

One day later, Durante's on top.

 

By opening night Keaton's face isn't even in the ads anymore. That's sad.

In other theaters...

What is Broadway Bad? Despite Joan Blondell, this is a Fox rather than a Warner Bros. picture,  so there's no easy recourse to a trailer. TCM can at least give us a synopsis, and here's a review from one of the Milwaukee dailies.

Finally, Ginger Rogers gets double exposure in Milwaukee this week, not even counting 42nd Street. Not only does she have a supporting role in Broadway Bad, but she plays a double role in her own starring vehicle at the Riverside.

The Thirteenth Guest is a picture you can find in public-domain box sets, and it's an above-average Poverty Row old-dark-house affair, thanks to such A-minus talent of the moment as Rogers and Warner Bros. contract player Lyle Talbot. Things seem definitely to be looking up for Miss Rogers....

Elsewhere in the blogosphere: OUR HOSPITALITY

A Top 100 countdown of the greatest comedy movies, based on lists contributed by a diverse sample of fans, continues at the Wonders in the Dark collaborative blog. Blog-wrangler and generous soul Sam Giuliano invited me to contribute another essay to the countdown -- the previous one covered Laurel & Hardy's Big Business -- to mark the Buster Keaton film Our Hospitality's place at No. 24 on the list. I watched the film for the first time in several years earlier this month and saw thematic elements I hadn't noticed before, particularly how Buster's train journey serves as a coming of age in a symbolically young America, right down to the train severing a symbolic (and dangerous) umbilical cord. Lest that make the film (or my essay) sound pretentious, rest assured that Hospitality is still one of the funniest features of the silent era. To read more, and to see the complete countdown to date, follow this link and find your favorites! If you don't find them, they could be yet to come.

Buster Keaton in THE HAUNTED HOUSE (1921)

Buster Keaton had a theory of cinema and a theory of comedy -- defining theory broadly to encompass the views of an unacademic clown. The theory of cinema is what we identify with him most: the no-faking rule that obliged him to do his own stunts and film gags in one shot as often as possible. His theory of comedy is less easy to pin down. Keaton had a parodic temperament and often mocked pop-culture phenomena, from William S. Hart's westerns in the silent short The Frozen North to amateur-hour radio shows in his talkie short Grand Slam Opera. His commitment to realistic gagging did not preempt a sense of the absurd that came naturally to practitioners of the burlesque violence of vaudeville. A strong narrative sensibility sometimes surrendered to an impulse to do gags for their own sake. That's what happened in his sixth silent short, in which a hackneyed "old dark house" plot provides a macguffin for a riot of gags out of all proportion to the situation.
The situation is that a bank official (Joe Roberts) is running a counterfeiting operation out of an allegedly haunted house and releasing the fake bills through the bank. The house's haunted reputation is expected to keep snoopers away -- how different then than now! -- but the counterfeiters have gimmicked up the place to further discourage intruders. Sheet-wearers and skeleton-suits work shifts scaring folks, while the main stairway is something out of an amusement park; pulling a lever makes the stairs collapse into a slide. Obviously the devil's work.

Buster works at the same bank, and in the first gag to make no sense, he is chauffeured to his job even though he seems to be no more than a teller. In a scene surreally foreshadowing Keaton's own profligate ways, he dips his hand in a glue pot while trying to moisten his fingers and sticks wads of money together in his hapless mitts. The stickiness spreads until four check-cashers form a synchronized chorus line trying to fling the dollars off their palms. Much money is torn apart this way, but is Buster destroying the counterfeits or good currency? Later, when robbers appear with guns drawn, he can barely get his sticky hands out of his pockets to raise them.

Framed for Roberts's crimes, Buster flees to the haunted house, not knowing what awaits there. At the same time, a cut-rate theatrical troupe is driven from their stage after their prop house collapses in mid-performance of Faust, and the actors, including a man in a devil suit, head to the same house. This creates ample opportunity for confusion, but Keaton strangely misses the chance to get much humor out of the fake-ghosts getting scared by the devil-man. Instead, once in the house, he throws away all narrative logic. The haunting is carried out on a ridiculous scale, and he stairs collapse beneath Buster without anyone seeming to control the lever. One moment simply can't happen outside cinema: as Buster watches, two skeleton-men appear to assemble a mannequin from various body parts. Once the head is added, and after an almost invisible edit, they reveal their handiwork as a living, breathing person. No wonder Buster is terrified! And terrified he often is here -- whatever happened to that great stone face?

In fact, Keaton and co-director Eddie Cline want to show off how expressive Buster can be within his self-imposed limitations. His big acting moment comes when he stumbles upon two alleged ghosts with their sheets half-off having a casual chat. The illusion of horror dispelled -- despite that earlier hellacious vision -- Keaton conveys with a purse-lipped sigh his new awareness and anger at both the crooks for pulling a fast one on him and himself for falling for it. From this point he mocks the ghosts -- who don't note the mockery -- by playing traffic cop as they parade through a hallway before finally turning the tables and snatching a sheet to disguise himself and get the drop on Roberts.

Buster's triumph pales before what's probably the short's most famous gag, the topper that comes after our hero has been knocked out in mid-rescue. He envisions a celestial stairway and climbs to the pearly gates, doffing his hat to angels along the way. But St. Peters turns him down, and the stairs become another slide sending Buster all the way down to the infernal region until he wakes up for the actual happy ending. This is often taken as some authorial statement on the futility of Buster's existence, but while Keaton's humor was often sardonically fatalistic -- he ends films with tombstones more than once -- here I think he was just so enamored with the sliding stairs that he wanted to give them an encore on a cosmic scale.

The paradox at the heart of Keaton's cinematic comedy is that however much he strives to make his gags realistic, he also insists that things on screen aren't as they seem. The Haunted House is probably his most blatant exercise of that essential contradiction, but he would play with his own and the audience's misperceptions more subtly and effectively in later shorts like The Goat. Here he's still discovering the potential of cinema and figuring out the rules he wants to play by while also expressing some satirical nostalgia for the old barnstorming theatrical days. He's also imitating Harold Lloyd's Haunted Spooks to some extent, just as Lloyd probably took some inspiration from Keaton's next short, Hard Luck, when making Never Weaken later in 1921 -- but that's a topic for another time. For now, let's concede that getting scared by fake ghosts is beneath Keaton, and that he still got a fairly amusing short out of the concept.

Buster Keaton in NEIGHBORS (1920)

While Buster Keaton's fifth self-produced and co-directed short subject represents a new high in stuntwork and overall comic timing, it also stands as Keaton's most sustained commentary on race, or at least the nearest he came to a commentary. The main storyline of the 17-minute film is the Romeo-Juliet romance of Buster and Virgina Fox, the children of hostile if not feuding slum families whose yards are divided by a board fence. The young people pass love notes through a knothole when their parents aren't looking. Virginia's dad (Joe Roberts) has sent Buster sailing on a clothesline back into his own yard, where his own dad (Joe Keaton -- his own dad) was beating a carpet before Buster replaced the carpet. Buster does a remarkable vertical spin upon taking the blow, and Dad's efforts to release him end with Buster face down in a rain barrel and head first in the mud beneath it. When Dad finally extricates him, the camera lingers on Buster's muddied face, and you get the uncomfortable feeling that Keaton wants you to laugh because the mud somehow makes Buster look black. But there's a point to this. Moments later, Buster avenges himself by bopping Roberts on the head with a broom -- except that he's mistaken a cop's helmet for Roberts's hat. The angry cop looks over the fence and sees a dark face. Buster retreats to a laundry table and quickly washes his face. The cop enters the yard and passes right by the freshly-scrubbed Buster. Exiting into an alley, the cop finds a genuine black man passing through and promptly nabs him. That's profiling, brother.

Silent comedy was politically correct in many different directions. A comic might assert, for instance, that if anyone was dumber than a colored man, it was a cop. And so the flatfoot pauses in his arrest to shoo off a group of kids shooting craps as another cop saunters into the scene. The first cop then grabs the second by the arm and resumes his march, leaving the innocent to go his way. Meanwhile, Buster's Mom blames a house painter for soiling her towel, and in the exchange a pail of paint comes down on Buster's head. Darkened once more -- was the guy painting the house brown? -- he's recognized by the cop as his original assailant and nabbed. Buster has managed to grab a towel and has wiped his face halfway clean by the time the cop reaches his call box. The black man watches this from safety and blows Buster a mocking kiss. As Buster switches profiles, now dark, now light, the cop grows hopelessly baffled. He turns around once more and Buster has vanished screen right. In the same shot, the cop runs off in search of his dark quarry, and we see that Buster has shimmied up a telephone pole. He jumps down, only to be grabbed by another cop. Dragged past a ballpark, Buster pauses to look through a knothole, telling the lawman that Babe Ruth is at bat. You should know what that means. Right on cue, a ball sails over the fence and beans the cop. But Buster isn't really scot free until he can dive into a wagon of laundry hauled by a black woman -- without a cop noticing, of course. Neighbors's digression on race ends on a sour note when Buster struggles to rise from the laundry pile and is all-too predictably mistaken by the Negress and her family as a ghost. They run away and Buster heads back home.

Speaking of digressions ... It was an old racist commonplace that blacks were more superstitious and susceptible to fright than any other ethnic group. Where the idea came from I can't say, but it had pernicious consequences in cinema when D. W. Griffith made their supposed fear of the archetypal white-sheeted ghost the basis for the Ku Klux Klan. But I wonder sometimes whether the influence flowed the other way, whether the big joke behind blacks' fear of ghosts was that they mistook the ghosts for the Klan. Every silent comic except Chaplin exploited this stereotype, though Harold Lloyd took a redeeming egalitarian approach to it in his short Haunted Spooks, where he's just as scared of ghosts as the black servants and its actually one of the servants, not Harold, who discovers that the ghosts are impostors. Cowardice is a great leveler, and it became practically obligatory (again, not for Chaplin) for comedians to undergo an ordeal by fright -- Keaton's own next short will be The Haunted House. But does Keaton's resort to the stereotype of black fear make him a racist? Only to the extent that he was a man of his time and the times were racist -- but the business leading up to the ghost bit is also a kind of acknowledgment of the unfair treatment blacks were subject to. Comics were as beset by cops on film as anyone was in life, and if black audiences empathized with the comics' plight, here was a momentary hint that the empathy was mutual.

The rest of Neighbors is pure physical comedy, some of it almost pointless -- as when Buster "invents" a levered plank that will slap anyone on the ass who goes through the door between the fences. The film's climax, an elopement following an aborted wedding, is far more inspired. Roberts has broken up the wedding because he despises Buster's five-and-dime ring as an unfit offering to his daughter -- he crushes the thing between thumb and forefinger to make the point. Virginia still loves Buster, however, and with his brothers he contrives an escape for them both. He and she are marooned on the third stories of their respective buildings. Buster's brothers appear through the back door and the second-floor window and carry him across the yards to Virginia's window. They bring a suitcase back to Buster's room and come back for Virginia -- briefly diving through three windows when Roberts appears in the yard. Detected at last, the brothers run for it, with Virigina (a dummy) over Buster's shoulders. The scene to this point has been a marvel of precision timing, but now it becomes miraculous. The brothers run through a three-story scaffold, reunite and keep on running. Then the middle brother gets caught on a clothesline; as he gets shot backward, Buster (with the dummy) lands perfectly on the bottom brother's shoulders without breaking stride. Then Buster has to hit the sidewalk running when the last brother falls through an opening. His descent finally concludes when he and Virginia (now restored to herself) slide into a coal pit where the Justice of the Peace who had tried to marry them earlier is conveniently waiting for them.

While Keaton still hasn't topped his initial release, One Week, Neighbors is his best short since then and his most accomplished work as a director to date. He (and Eddie Cline) show greater mastery of space and a willingness to keep the camera rolling and moving to expand the dimensions of a gag. One strong example of this comes during a mid-film chase when a once-clueless cop notices Keaton's shadow on the ground. He very carefully traces the line of the shadow, and now, when most other directors would have cut to the comic on top of the telephone pole, Keaton pans upward and upward until we finally appreciate how high Buster has climbed.

Moments like the human ladder have the visual inspiration of an early comic strip, but Keaton is one of the few moviemakers in 1920 with the visual skill to top the cartoonists. Many a silent short looks like a comic strip on film, but Keaton's look life comic strips come to life.

Buster Keaton in CONVICT 13 (1920)

If Buster Keaton held back his first independent short until he had produced a more distinctive work, it was apparently okay to release his third short, following the breakthrough of One Week, even though Convict 13 seems like something any silent comic might make in a prison setting. Worse, Keaton can't even fill 20 minutes with prison gags. You get the impression after the first five minutes that he'd wanted to make a comedy about golf, but gave up after some unimpressive business while trying to extract a ball from a fish. Not once, not twice, but three times Buster dives into a pond, each time grabbing a different fish and throttling it until he gets his ball back. I presume we're meant to find his persistence amusing, but that's the best Keaton can do with the subject. Well, Chaplin hardly fared better when he felt compelled to address the golf craze in the first part of The Idle Class. There really isn't much to do with the subject in slapstick comedy unless you're aiming for the all-out absurd as Larry Semon was in Golf. Here Semon actually surpassed the masters because he took golf mania off the links and had his idiot character wreak havoc by practising his game indoors. But making perhaps the best silent comedy about golf is a small triumph at most -- and I don't claim to have exhausted the subject. I will give Keaton credit for a proto-surreal image of himself teeing off on a ball bobbing in the water, after he'd liberated it from the fish, and for having a mostly unstereotyped black actor as his caddy.

After Keaton kayos himself by bouncing a ball against a wall and into his head, Convict 13 takes on its true nature. An escaped prisoner, the numbered convict of the title, comes across the unconscious Buster and switches clothes with him. In a typical instance of Buster's tunnel vision, he doesn't immediately notice that he's wearing the archetypal striped uniform of the jailbird. It's not until he's flanked by menacing prison guard that he wonders what's the matter and notices the stripes and the unlucky number on his sleeve. He flees, of course, but his flight is actually some sort of acceptance. He could have tried to explain what he might presume to have happened. He could at least have insisted on his innocence. But it's almost as if he assumes that, clothed as a convict, he must be a fugitive. The message of the film does seem to be that clothes make the man. The guards don't know their charges by facial features. The real Convict 13, wearing Buster's clothes, can walk right past them, yet they never question that Buster, by virtue of his clothes, is their prisoner. This complacent acceptance of superficiality is a theme of the picture. It's also expressed when a gang of guards falls in behind Buster as he attempts to walk inconspicuously away from the hunt. He ends up leading a line of march, but manages to shake his extended tail by going into evolutions and getting them all to turn in the other direction while he runs off. But Buster himself has a passive compulsion to accept his circumstances. Once he inadvertently imprisons himself while trying to hide from his pursuers, he becomes a model guest, cleaning the dust off the soles of his shoes before entering the prison yard, after first knocking on the gate. Even when he learns that he's to be hanged momentarily, he doesn't get real and recall that he's innocent. He simply goes with the flow. Perhaps there's something uniquely Keatonish about this after all.

The prison is an absurd place where hangings are spectator events worked by concessions sellers. When Buster's hanging is sabotaged by his girlfriend's replacement of the noose with her father the warden's elastic exercise cord, dad calms the crowd by promising to hang two convicts tomorrow. As in future Keaton films, the border between realistic violence and burlesque is fuzzy. When a riot breaks out, convicts and guards alike are shot, and not in the butt like in a Three Stooges short. But one such victim betrays the burlesque by throwing a few classic convulsive pantomime kicks as he expires. Before this, Buster has turned from con to guard after accidentally braining his keeper with his sledgehammer. Again, no one questions his authenticity or notes the new guard's resemblance to the presumed Convict 13. And again, Buster has a moment when his clothes are his undoing. A giant convict has been riled into a frenzy by a bullying guard and has laid out practically the entire platoon. Buster ambles onto the scene and seems to have forgotten that he's now a guard. He wonders why the con is eyeing him so strangely, and in shots that mirror his own first encounter with the guards, he notices at last that this is a convict, and he himself is a guard -- they are natural enemies, because their costumes make them so.

The absurdities of the picture are cheaply explained away by having Buster the golfer wake from his golfball-induced dream, but the dream-world of Convict 13 is not unlike the "real" world of Keaton's later pictures. At this early point, the dream is a hedge, and as a whole the prison theme is one that Keaton actually does better, at least for a few moments, in one of his lamented Educational shorts from the 1930s, Jail Bait. That film has a great extended gag on a similar theme, with Buster switching from con to guard and back again during a riot and always running into the wrong faction. But if an Educational is better than an early silent short, that really just means that Keaton, despite the prodigy of One Week, is still learning his craft and discovering his unique sense of humor. Convict 13 shows what he thinks is funny; later he'll film what he knows is funny.

Buster Keaton in ONE WEEK (1920)

On his second try as a star and co-director, Buster Keaton made a short subject he deemed fit to stand as his debut as a lead comic after years of apprenticeship under Fatty Arbuckle. His first try, The High Sign, seemed too generic or too like Arbuckle's films to really satisfy him. One Week seemed more of a defining work, and it proved a hit. What about it defines Keaton as his own man artistically?

The story proceeds day by day through the first week together for two newlyweds, played by Keaton and Sibyl Seely. Instead of honeymooning, they build a house on property and materials provided by a wealthy uncle. The inexperienced couple, with some malicious assistance from Buster's disgruntled yet dissembling romantic rival, turn their DIY house kit into a quasi-cubist nightmare. Their housewarming party ends disastrously when a storm turns the unstable structure into a whirligig hurling guests into the yard. Finally, the young marrieds learn that they built their home on the wrong tract of land, and have to move it to the other side of the tracks, just as a train bears down on the crossing....

My shorthand memory of the film gives the spurned suitor more credit for Buster's week of woe, but his sabotage -- he misnumbers some of the boxes of the by-the-numbers house kit -- isn't as decisive as I remembered. Before he shows up to make trouble, we already get the impression that Buster's an incompetent carpenter. We see him saw off a plank he's sitting on, from the wrong side, tumble to the ground and bounce upward in one of Keaton's many spectacular falls. For all we know, the only real consequence of the rival's mischief is that the house looks funny; we can't tell if he's to blame for its peculiar rotary foundation. But more than his malice or Buster's ineptitude, the real subversive element here is pure bad luck. Keaton and co-director Eddie Cline give us signals throughout. Buster's wedding car (driven by the rival) has a sign from well-wishers reading, "Good Luck You'll Need It." After the storm, Buster recovers a good-luck horseshoe that has clearly proven useless. The week itself includes Friday the 13th. The odds are against Buster and Sibyl regardless of the rival's pranks.

The opening title card itself warns us that sweetness often turns sour. It could be argued that One Week is a metaphor for the disappointments and disillusions of the honeymoon the couple never enjoys -- with its one hopeful note being their clear resolution to stick together at the end.

In that context it's appropriate to note the extent, unique in Keaton's work, to which the leading lady is made a sex object. Sibyl Seely gets a bathtub scene in which she is clearly topless, setting up one of Keaton's fourth-wall breaking gags when his directorial hand covers the camera lens as Sibyl reaches to grab the soap she'd dropped on the floor. Seely is also unusual among Keaton's actresses for the amount of physical business Keaton gives her. She stomps her foot on an uneven floor in one scene and gets to hop out of the frame in playful pain. Later, she sprays herself in the face opening an oldschool milk bottle. She tumbles about inside the spinning house and takes a dive like the rest when it spits her out. Working in tandem, Seely and Keaton establish an attractive conjugal symmetry. When they see how their house has mutated after the storm, they fall sideways into each other, so that each is propping the other up. Later, they react to the film's famous climactic sight gag by flinging themselves in opposite directions. She's not even close to Keaton's equal in physical comedy -- who was? -- but the fact that she and he tried so hard to make the pairing work makes you regret that she didn't stick with him longer. The Kino supplemental materials relate that Seely had to bow out because working with Keaton had worn her out. That's too bad, and maybe the way she wore out convinced Keaton to give his actresses more passive roles later. Of course, most of his later films have him courting a girl, not marrying her.

So if One Week is atypical Keaton in that respect, what marks it as the arrival of a distinct cinematic talent? Contrary to what Keaton himself might have believed, it wasn't just the spectacle of the monstrous house and its spectacular demise, though that is a prophecy of the massive destruction of The General and Steamboat Bill Jr.

Comparing Keaton to his contemporaries, you can get spectacular destruction from many comics. What Keaton provides is extraordinary timing and an inspired sense of space that makes the climactic misdirection with the trains possible. The symmetry Keaton and Seely create is just a part of the overall effect. Other comics offer more mayhem, but without any sense of pace or any real momentum. Watch two reels of Larry Semon, for instance, and you usually get people pummeling each other and destroying things until an arbitrary halt. Keaton's seven-day structure gives One Week a satisfying sense of structure and completeness. He'd become known for his character's troubles with machines, but with his second two-reeler Keaton's studio has itself become a well-oiled machine. But it still required real inspiration to run so smoothly, and the next couple of Keatons will prove somewhat less inspired. Yet if One Week revealed Keaton as someone worth watching, the next shorts -- Convict 13 and The Scarecrow -- will be worth examining in the weeks to come.

Buster Keaton in THE HIGH SIGN (1920)

Kino's new "Ultimate 3-Disc Edition" of Buster Keaton's silent short subjects starts appropriately enough with the first one he made as a star after inheriting Fatty Arbuckle's spot on the Joseph M. Schenck roster when Arbuckle graduated to feature films. According to the supplemental materials, Keaton shelved The High Sign because he didn't consider it enough of an announcement of his individual style, and released it only when an injury made it necessary in order to meet his contractual obligations. It's not a bad little film at all, and it's not really any more primitive or Arbuckle-esque than some of his other early shorts. But you can see why Keaton thought he could do better.

Buster lands on screen after being thrown from a speeding train into "somewhere," having come from "nowhere," as an opening title informs us. He strolls over to a nearby merry-go-round and snatches a newspaper from under a passing rider's arm. It's a strangely defective newspaper; all the pages seem to be attached, and the edition threatens to engulf Buster as he unfolds it. There's no good reason for a newspaper to be this way, but near the end of his life Keaton would figure out a better device for the gag: a map in the Canadian travelogue The Railroader. In any event, he finds the classifieds and sees a want-ad for a target shooter for a local shooting gallery. He resolves to get the job, but not before the carousel rider, having lost his paper, accosts him and pays him for the same copy, not realizing that it's his.

There's a guileless ruthlessness to early Buster that's reminiscent of Arbuckle and is best displayed here when he decides he needs to practice before applying for the job. To do that, he needs a gun. He gets one by snatching it out of a policeman's holster, replacing it with a banana. He takes target practice with absurd results. In some of the simplest sight gags, he points his gun at one bottle, and the bottle to its left or right explodes -- or, firing straight ahead at a bottle, he'll hit a heckling Al St. John, a fellow Arbuckle alumnus, right in the ass. Buster needs little practice before applying, and he works out a way to impress "Tiny Tim," the giant boss of the shooting gallery, by contriving one of Keaton's characteristic contraptions. Whenever he fires at a target, his mechanism sets a dog after food outside. The dog's action rings a bell, convincing Tiny Tim, who is only listening, not watching, that Buster's a crack shot.

Tiny Tim leads a double life. He secretly leads the Blinking Buzzards, a Black Hand-like extortion gang, and Buster's apparent prowess with firearms makes him an ideal assassin. He is sworn into the gang and given his first assignment: to kill the wealthy August Pennypincher should the magnate fail to pay the money demanded by September 1. "The first of September will be the end of August," the Buzzards warn in their extortion letter -- one of several bits of verbal humor that seem uncharacteristic of Keaton. But there's a problem with the scheme: Pennypincher and his pretty daughter had earlier visited the shooting gallery and, equally impressed or duped, the great man had hired Buster as his bodyguard. But if he doesn't kill Pennypincher, the Buzzards will kill him....

The High Sign reminds me of the melodramatic underworld thrillers Lon Chaney Sr. was making at the same time, and given Keaton's parodic inclinations, he may have envisioned the film as an outright genre parody. There's definitely a self-conscious quality to the short, most obviously seen in what may be its best known shot. Tiny Tim has encountered the cop Buster robbed earlier, who is embarrassed upon encountering the menace to pull a banana out of his holster. Tim snatches it, scares the cop away, and eats the banana, letting the peel drop to the sidewalk like the slob he is. Here comes Buster around a corner. You know what must happen -- except it doesn't. Our hero walks right past the peel and gives the titular high sign -- the crossed hands in front of the nose, fingers flapping like wings -- right at the camera and the audience. It's an announcement that his aren't going to be your normal predictable two-reelers.

At the same time, it may have struck Keaton as too unreal of a gesture, too absurd like some of this film's sight gags, to be entirely satisfactory. But there are scenes here that are already echt Keaton, especially his chase scene through the two stories and four rooms of a cutaway house full of trapdoors and secret passages. It's the first hint of Keaton's particular sense of spectacle that would find expensive expression in his later features. But overall, Keaton was probably right to believe that he hadn't yet found his distinctive tone or attitude. Still, his rookie effort compares favorably with many a contemporary short from more seasoned performers, and we can be patient with it today knowing that there are masterpieces to come.

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This review will most likely inaugurate a series on the Keaton silent shorts. They shouldn't take long to write and will help me maintain my schedule when I find myself dithering over which features I should review. Also, Keaton is probably still my favorite silent comedian and I look forward to retracing his steps as he ascends to mastery. Not to give anything away, but we won't have long to wait.

Buster Keaton's 'Lost' Educational Films (1934-7)

From the epic spectacle of The General and the storm scenes of Steamboat Bill Jr. it was a long way down for Buster Keaton until he ended up at Educational Pictures, a longtime purveyor of comedy shorts ("The Spice of the Program") distributed by Fox. Mishandling by M-G-M producers, alcoholism and the collapse of his marriage, along with a sense of obsolescence that clung to nearly all the silent comedy stars, left the man once and later considered Charlie Chaplin's greatest rival near the bottom of the movie ladder. For more than 70 years after he made them, the sixteen Educational shorts have been more talked about, or simply dismissed, than seen. Just this year, Kino International finally gave them an official DVD release as the Lost Keaton collection. Are they as bad as legend alleged, or are they neglected gems? The final scorecard, predictably enough, is mixed.

A characteristic Keaton pose from Mixed Magic (1936)

The Educationals were films made in a hurry, and sometimes leave the impression that Keaton, his usual director Charles Lamont, and their writers didn't have enough time to think through the comic prospects of their stories. The most glaring such case is the third short in the series, Palooka From Paducah. A bearded Buster plays alongside his father, mother and sister as a family of hillbillies who decide to make money by putting Buster's big brother to work as a professional wrestler. The first half of the film has some good physical humor as Buster attempts to train his far stronger brother. You figure you see what's coming: Buster will somehow have to do the rasslin' instead. You'd be wrong, though; someone thought it'd be funnier if Buster played the referee. That someone, too, was wrong. It can't help but look anticlimactic, and since the big brother is given Buster's generic character name, "Elmer," while Buster himself plays "Jim," I wonder whether there was a last-minute role switch for some reason.

There's an even bigger disparity between set-up and final execution in the next short, One Run Elmer. This is considered one of Keaton's best Educationals, and it was one of his own favorites of the group. Their feelings are justified by the first half, which establishes the rivalry of two gas station owners on either side of a road through the desert. The desolate location and Buster's flimsy shack of a station simply feel right; this is where he should be in the sound era. He has a spectacular fall while trying to yank his gas pump a foot too far, but there are also stronger, less violent gags. Buster and his rival get into a price war, constantly erasing and rewriting their rates on chalkboard signs until Buster elegantly transforms his "31" into an "18." He learns that he's gone too far when potential customers presume that his cheap gas is no good. Later, Buster and his rival, both ballplayers, "warm up" by giving each other batting practice across that road, the rivals solid hits and wild pitches practically destroying Buster's station. After that build-up, the climax disappoints by relying too much on the gimmicks Buster used for live comedy baseball games. Worse, plot threads are lost. Much is made of the fact that the umpire is the man whose car window Buster broke earlier, but nothing's really made of it and the ump calls the game more or less straight.

David McLeod's liner notes often indict the Educationals for failing to follow through on or live up to potentially strong comic ideas. In one case, time seems to have left him out of the joke. Keaton's penultimate short, Ditto, is apparently considered one of the worst of the group, but it proves to be a fairly amusing little film with a satirical bent bordering on the surreal. Buster is an iceman with time on his hands and romantic dreams -- he's just started Gone With the Wind -- who gets himself farcically entangled with identical twins without realizing the duplication. Finally learning that both women are already married, he denounces them for making a plaything of him and renounces civilization. Fifteen years later (1952), he's a bearded hermit living in an isolated pocket of wilderness while civilization advances above him, family airplanes pulling trailers en route to vacations abroad.

Hermit Buster eventually encounters a woman who reminds him of his lost love(s?), and he promptly renounces his hermitage. Shaven and groomed, he reverts to the Buster of yore for his tryst. The final gag is deemed disappointing because Educational couldn't spring for a process shot turning the two girls into five. Instead, we see five girls from behind, each sitting in a director's chair, as Buster faces them (and us) staring in bewilderment. But the gag is set us exactly as the filmmakers wanted. They want you to notice the names on the chairs, because they tell you that Buster has encountered the Dionne Quintuplets, who would be 18 in 1952, and whom many Americans knew on a first-name basis as early mass-media celebrities. Ditto should probably get a demerit for dated humor, but sometimes it requires a sense of history to understand how the original audience would have seen (and gotten) the gag.

It's in films like Ditto where we're most likely to salvage something of the authentic Keaton sensibility in the necessary absence of Buster's signature large-scale stunts. His classic silents aren't mere stunt-fests, but often have a strong absurd or satiric sensibility, as in his brutal genre parody The Frozen North or the aging-and-death denouement of his feature College. Keaton distinguishes himself from Chaplin, for instance, in rarely taking seriously the dramatic situations that frame his comedy. For Chaplin, romance is all too real; for Keaton, it's often simply ridiculous. His parodic instinct comes through most strongly during the Educational period in the one short for which he claimed a story credit, and the one long assumed to be the best of the series, Grand Slam Opera. It's also the most cinematically imaginative film in the group, a fact for which Keaton most likely deserves the credit.

Buster proposes to juggle an empty whiskey bottle on the radio. "Is it empty?" the bandleader asks. "Yeah," Keaton mutters, "I made sure of that." Arguably uncomfortable alcoholic humor in Grand Slam Opera.

Grand Slam Opera is a send-up of the Major Bowes Amateur Hour and other talent shows that predated The Gong Show or American Idol. It also gives Keaton a chance to parody Fred Astaire by wrecking a hotel room while attempting to dance on the furniture and mantelpiece. Buster hopes to win a prize by juggling on the radio, only to get into a fight with the studio bandleader. As a whole, the short is a mockery of rags-to-riches, star-is-born type success stories. Buster gets a musical sendoff from his local supporters and the usual montage of train wheels and so forth takes him to New York. After his defeat, there's another montage of futile motion, culminating with Buster trying to hitch a ride from an Indian woman carrying her baby papoose-style. He tries to ride the bumper of a stationary car, and that gives him a chance to learn from the radio that he'd won the radio contest and has a prize waiting for him in New York. There follows one more dazzling montage of wheels, propellers, stop and go signs, all superimposed over Buster running at breakneck speed, as if it only took him exactly that long to get back east. It leaves you with the stunned feeling that THIS is what Keaton should have been doing all along once sound arrived.

None of the Educationals are without features of interest, except arguably for a lame service comedy, Tars and Stripes, that seems to exist only because Keaton and Lamont got permission to film at a naval base. Many of them have a historical interest, Palooka From Paducah and Love Nest on Wheels showing both the Keaton family and pop culture's growing fascination with hillbillies at the time the Li'l Abner comic strip was breaking big across the country. It's interesting seeing Keaton's team assimilating recent phenomena like the success of It Happened One Night. In The E-Flat Man Buster encourages his reticent girl to emulate the famous hitchhiking scene; "I saw this once, and it worked!" he says. The setup has a nice payoff when the car that pulls over proves to be a police car.

Mack Sennett feels the same influence in the short he directed for Keaton, The Timid Young Man. That one finishes with a runaway bride hitchhiking in her swimsuit. Naturally several cars pull over at once, with Buster (as a runaway groom) in the rear. In classic Sennett style, yet with Keaton elegance, Buster's car slowly pushes all the other cars forward until he can pick up the girl. Other shorts work more timelessly: the battle royale before a justice of the peace in Three On A Limb; Buster beaten down in succession by prison guards and escapees despite changes in uniform in Jail Bait; the sci-fi buncombe of The Chemist that leaves mortarboard-wearing gangsters terrified of rain. And every Educational short has at least one thing going for it: it's not a Columbia Keaton short (though I intend to do justice to those at another time).

Despite many inspired moments, there's no denying a diminishment of Keaton's powers in these shorts, especially when you compare them to Laurel & Hardy's work in this period, or even the earliest Three Stooges shorts for Columbia. I don't think I could honestly call any of the Educationals a classic, but as a set I found them fascinating, if also sometimes sad. I wouldn't recommend Lost Keaton to anyone simply looking for laughs, but for fans of Keaton and the slapstick tradition, the set is definitely worth seeing if not worth having.