Spite Marriage is Buster Keaton’s second film for MGM and his final silent feature. He had, in fact, wanted to make this film as a talkie (he was very enthusiastic about sound), but was overridden by studio honchos. This film marks the true transition for Keaton, as the studio began taking full control […]
I have mentioned The Cameraman many times in the past, usually referring to it as the “last great Buster Keaton film”. I have since come to feel that his next film, Spite Marriage is a classic in its own right, but The Cameraman, the first film Keaton made for MGM, remains the last feature […]
Viewed December 27, 2006
Three Ages is an ambitious comedy from Buster Keaton, where he strives to show how love has changed (but mostly stayed the same) throughout the ages. He does this by illustrating three cases of love: a caveman, a Roman citizen and a modern day man (well, modern for 1923, anyway).
All three […]
Viewed December 21, 2006
GE recently debuted their “Imagination Theater“, a web site devoted to short films (and clips about GE products). The films are a mix of live action office-based films and animated shorts that are more abstract.
The Crossing shows the value of “thinking outside the box”, as they say. Its shows four […]
Viewed December 5, 2006
My Wife’s Relations is classic short-form Buster Keaton. Buster gets hauled into court by a woman who thinks he broke a courthouse window. Thinking they are an engaged couple (and speaking no English), the judge marries them. While the woman’s family is aghast at the shrimp their sister has […]
Viewed December 3, 2006
Now You’re Talking is an instructional short by Max and Dave Fleischer, best known for their later “Betty Boop”, “Popeye” and “Superman” cartoons. Through a combination of live action and animation, it shows the viewer how their telephone works by focusing on a man who dozes off after having a poor […]
Viewed November 26, 2006
Fatty’s Spooning Day aka Mabel, Fatty and the Law is a relatively early entry from Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle that displays all his typical character traits. He womanizes. He gets in trouble with the law. Just about the only thing he doesn’t do is the acrobatics that he was […]
Viewed November 16, 2006
The Paperhanger’s Helper aka Stick Around is interesting because it is exactly the kind of comedy that Laurel and Hardy would be making history with just a few years later, and yet it doesn’t work here. This is because while Oliver Hardy is present, his sidekick (in a role that would […]
Viewed November 9, 2006
One Week is a classic Buster Keaton short that finds him and his new bride (Sybil Seely) given a build-it-yourself house as a wedding gift. When Buster’s rival changes the numbers on some of the boxes, Buster’s efforts prove to be more comical than effective.
This short is a prime example of […]
Viewed October 29, 2006
The Paleface is a pretty standard entry from Buster Keaton during his pre-feature days. It’s a funny little short about a white man who is taken for a god by a tribe on American Indians on the verge of losing their land to an oil baron.
There are plenty of Buster’s trademark […]
Viewed August 5, 2006
Alice’s Wonderland is the first in a series of ‘Alice’ films that Walt Disney made in his early days and that marked his first major success (he would make over fifty during the series’ five year run). What made the ‘Alice’ films so unique for their day was the way that […]
Viewed July 22, 2006
The Balloonatic is a rather trite little entry in Bustern Keaton’s series of shorts. A typical series of sight gags, it lacks the more detailed storyline found in Keaton’s better shorts.
Basically, we follow Buster as he finds himself (after a few initial escapades) trapped on a hot air balloon and then […]
Viewed July 15, 2006
West of Hot Dog is Stan Laurel’s parody of the 1922 film West of the Pecos. It follows the travails of a young “tenderfoot” who travels to the West to claim his inheritance from a deceased uncle. Along the way, he runs afoul of a group of bandits determined to […]
Viewed July 8, 2006
The final film in Fatty Arbuckle’s series of shorts, The Garage also marks the end of his official working relationship with Buster Keaton. There would be occasional cameos over the following years as Arbuckle moved to features and Keaton started his own series of shorts, but this is the last time […]
Viewed July 4, 2006
The 1910 silent short The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is, perhaps, the oldest film version of L. Frank Baum’s famous ‘Oz’ stories. It is almost certainly the oldest one extant, as the other two made that year, The Land of Oz and Dorothy and the Scarecrow in Oz, are lost.
The Wizard […]
Viewed June 24, 2006
Kid Speed is another entry featuring Oliver Hardy from his days languishing as a character actor, bouncing from film to film, usually in the role of the heavy. This one revolves around two racecar drivers, The Speed Kid (Larry Semon) and Dangerous Dan McGraw (Hardy). Not only do they compete […]
Viewed June 17, 2006
In the years following his initial entry into films and prior to his successful teaming with Oliver Hardy, Stan Laurel often lent his talents to films for others, either as a bit player or, as in Yes, Yes, Nanette, a director. Laurel co-directs with Clarence Hennecke and is most likely responsible […]
Viewed June 10, 2006
Lucky Dog, filmed in 1919 but released in 1921, marked the first on-screen pairing of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. It couldn’t be more different that the comedies they would become famous for, but it still is good for a few laughs.
The set-up is dead simple: Laurel is a penniless traveler […]
Viewed May 27, 2006
In a bit of a change, I decided to watch a film from a star of the silent era that I am not terribly familiar with. I decided to watch Bromo and Juliet, a vehicle for Hal Roach Studio stalwart Charlie Chase. Chase was a relatively big star at the […]
Viewed May 20, 2006
A couple of years into Buster Keaton’s series of shorts, The Electric House finds Buster in strong form visually and athletically. Something does suffer, though, as the story is particularly weak.
The plot of this one has Buster accidentally given an electrical engineer’s diploma instead of the one he was supposed to […]
Viewed May 13, 2006
Convict 13 is one of Buster Keaton’s earliest solo shorts and it’s a fine one. Knocked unconcious during a golf game, Buster has his clothes taken by an escaped convict and finds himself in jail in the convict’s place. He spends the rest of the film trying to get out again, […]
Viewed May 12, 2006
Un Chien Andalou (The Andalusian Dog) is a surrealistic short film from Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali.
The imagry is often disturbing and, honestly, seldom makes any sense at all. Of course, that’s kind of what one expects from a film by Dali. Sliced eyeballs, ants crawling out of a man’s […]
Viewed May 6, 2006
Dogs of War is a wonderful entry in the ‘Our Gang’ series of films, this time from the silent era. The ‘Our Gang’ series existed long before Spanky, Alfalfa and the rest who would become more famous as ‘The Little Rascals’ and this one is from their early peak in the […]
Viewed April 29, 2006
The Hayseed has the strongest plot of any of the Roscoe Arbuckle / Buster Keaton films I’ve seen so far. The relatively complex tale involves one of Arbuckles traditional love triangles, and much of the same formula he had used in the past, but this time with more of a spine […]
Viewed April 22, 2006
Back Stage is wonderful because it gives us an inside view (albeit an over-the-top comedic one) at the goings-on behind the scenes in vaudville. By the time this film was made, vaudville was already dying. That one of its great practitioners, Buster Keaton, had moved exclusively to film is an […]
Viewed April 16, 2006
A Trip to the Moon is the oldest movie I have seen so far this year. Made near the dawn of cinema, it is a breakthrough film, utilizing special effects in a way not before seen.
The plot is very simple: scientists decide to built a rocket to visit the […]
Viewed April 8, 2006
Good Night, Nurse! is a somewhat wackier entry in the Arbuckle / Keaton canon. It’s story is looser than other entries, but it piles on the jokes and slapstick enough to make up for that.
It all starts with an extreme scene of Arbuckle trying to light a cigarette in a massive […]
Viewed April 1, 2006
1925’s Wizard of Oz is a textbook example of how not to adapt a great book to film. The plot and characters bear virtually no resemblance to the material on which they are based and what has replaced the original is far inferior. The only thing it does moderately well […]
Viewed March 25, 2006
Moonshine is a return to top form for the Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle / Buster Keaton team. It breaks free from the conventions that most of their pairings have been hampered by and provides a wonderful experience.
Arbuckle and Keaton play a pair of Revenue Agents out to catch moonshiners in the hills. […]
Viewed March 18, 2006
His Majesty, The Scarecrow of Oz is the only of the Oz Film Company’s silent films based on the work of L. Frank Baum that was apparently directed by Baum himself.
The basic plot of the original book, The Scarecrow of Oz, remains intact, but characters have been shifted around to […]
Viewed March 11, 2006
Liberty is one of the last silent shorts that Laurel and Hardy did together (they really didn’t do that many) before moving into talkies. It is different from other Laurel & Hardy shorts because of its use of Harold Lloyd-style “high-flying” stunts. Laurel & Hardy tended towards slapstick, but their […]
Viewed March 4, 2006
College is pretty much a formula Buster Keaton film of the era. Buster, fresh out of high school (btw, he is 32 at the time this film is made) is in love with one of the most popular girls in his class, played by Anne Cornwall. She spurns him, however, […]
Viewed February 25, 2006
The Magic Cloak of Oz is one of a series of “Oz” based films that L. Frank Baum produced around 1914. It is based on Baum’s novel Queen Zixi of Ix, which originally was not connected to Oz (although its characters later appeared in proper Oz books).
It tells the remarkable story […]
Viewed February 18, 2006
The Finishing Touch is an early entry in the Laurel & Hardy pairing and sets the stage for many more “working man” comedies to follow.
The premise is a simple one: Stan and Oliver are hired to finish the construction of a house. The pressures of finishing quickly, combined with the need […]
Viewed February 11, 2006
Taking a break from the Arbuckle/Keaton series of films, this week I watched a pre-Oliver Hardy outing from Stan Laurel, Mud and Sand. It is a parody of the classic Rudolph Valentino film Blood and Sand (1922) and follows the plot of that previous film; a tale of the rise and […]
Viewed February 4, 2006
The Bell Boy is another case of a Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle short with too little meat on its bones. But the performances are at least strong and the comedy lively.
The basic sructure of The Bell Boy is the wacky goings-on at a hotel. Caught in the middle of it all […]
Viewed January 29, 2006
Watching the (so far) mostly disappointing Roscoe Arbuckle / Buster Keaton shorts put me in the mind to see something with a bit more substance. The only Keaton feature that I owned, but had not seen, was his final film before going to work for MGM, Steamboat Bill, Jr., so I […]
Viewed January 28, 2006
Out West is a much stronger entry than the last couple of Arbuckle/Keaton shorts. A parody of westerns (naturally), it successfully tells its short tale without letting the jokes fall by the wayside.
Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle still hasn’t recaptured the positive nature that he displayed in The Butcher Boy, but he’s at […]
Viewed January 21, 2006
Coney Island is a much stronger entry in the Arbuckle / Keaton canon than the previous lightweight, The Rough House, but still lacks the cohesion that marked their first collaboration, The Butcher Boy.
For one thing, Arbuckle comes off as less sympathetic here than in the earlier film. In The Butcher Boy, […]
Viewed January 14, 2006
After watching The Butcher Boy (1917) last week, I was really in the mood to keep going through the Arbuckle/Keaton canon, so I decided to institute (at least for the time being) “Silent Short Saturday”. So, unless something more important comes along, I’ll watch one of these shorts (in chronological […]
Viewed January 6, 2006
The Butcher Boy stars silent screen legend Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and marks the screen debut of Buster Keaton, who would eventually far eclipse his friend in both popularity and influence. Already a popular vaudville star when he met Arbuckle, Keaton became immediately fascinated with the world of film and agreed […]