This is Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog's contribution to the Sixth Annual Buster Keaton Blogathon - happy to be a part of it!
To begin today's post, we thank Lea Stans of Silent-ology for hosting this and the previous five Buster Keaton Blogathons. Will post the full list of 2020 Buster Blogathon articles tomorrow.
Buster Keaton ranks atop the short list of our all-time favorites who ever appeared in or directed movies at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, so we're thrilled and delighted to contribute.
This, with some trepidation, brings us to one of Buster's dreaded MGM talkies, Speak Easily, arguably the best of the bunch that began with Free and Easy and ended with What! No Beer? (described by Buster as a "100 per cent turkey").
In the promotional posters, Buster's name is first but Durante's face dwarfs Keaton's. Funny, I have a sneaking suspicion who MGM was trying to build up as a new star here! Also notable: the poster describes a naughty love triangle storyline that does not occur in the movie.
The cautionary tale of Buster at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and part of the Keaton legend remains that The Great Stone Face transitioned from independent producer to MGM star and lost all creative control over his films in the process.
Buster was caught between his friends/colleagues - Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd pleaded with their fellow comedy filmmaker NOT to sign with MGM - and his family, as he was married to Natalie Talmadge, sister of Norma Talmadge (Buster's sister-in-law) who was married to Joseph Schenck, whose professional association with Keaton dated back to the comedian's first experiences in movies, working as stock company player, gagman and assistant director for Roscoe Arbuckle at Comique Productions. Joe Schenck's brother Nick was among the head honchos at MGM.
Why Speak Easily’s credits say “A Buster Keaton Production,” we have no clue.
Speak Easily is an MGM feature starring three top comedy talents, Buster Keaton, Jimmy Durante and Thelma Todd. For the three principal stars, it's a likable albeit second tier piece in their silver screen careers, with The General, Billy Rose's Jumbo, Hips Hips Hooray and the incredibly funny Charley Chase - Thelma Todd 2-reeler The Pip From Pittsburg, among others, representing the top tier.
Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, Our Gang and, in two films made by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the 1940's, Laurel & Hardy, had their problems with MGM (A Night At The Opera notwithstanding), even though Our Gang and L&H made many of the funniest comedy short subjects ever committed to celluloid, which were produced for MGM release by the Hal Roach Studio a.k.a. The Lot Of Fun.
Marie Dressler was one brilliant comedienne who was not held in check by Metro-Goldwyn Mayer.
The larger-than-life actress and comedienne, star of stage and screen, Marie Dressler alternated at MGM between dramas and lightweight comedies co-starring former Mack Sennett Comedies headliner Polly Moran - and is still known for her epic triple-take for the ages in reaction to Jean Harlow that closes George Cukor's dark comedy Dinner At Eight.
MGM's clear preference as the stars of comic films would be leading men and leading ladies who demonstrated a pronounced flair for comedy such as Robert Montgomery, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, and (especially) William Powell and Myrna Loy.
One star of MGM features who could be both a leading lady and a quite talented, goofy comedienne was the very funny Marion Davies.
Marion, like Marie Dressler, was not at all averse to broad humor and slapstick and even co-starred with Marie in The Patsy. It's a good bet that Davies was not held back from doing more comedies by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer brass, but by W.R. Hearst, who fancied her as a stately grand dame starring in costume dramas.
Buster Keaton wanted very much to make a talkie with Marie as his co-star and even pitched a western comedy in which the duo would co-star to Irving G. Thalberg. The MGM brass said no. A Buster Keaton - Marion Davies feature would have also had strong comedic possibilities, but Hearst would have no doubt nixed such an idea in less than a New York minute.
The most glaring problem with Speak Easily, and all the Keaton MGMs is the mega-studio's complete and utter inability to grasp the essential Keaton characterization. Why Lawrence Weingarten and other MGM execs in charge of these films thought casting Buster as a dimwit was funny, we'll never know. Perhaps MGM brass concluded that because The General was not a boffo box-office hit, having Buster play an indefatigable and resourceful fellow would mean bad box office. The penchant for turning Buster's intrepid and heroic, albeit slightly absent-minded character into a bumbling, blithering idiot is painful for Buster fans to watch!
In Speak Easily, he plays a professor - and spends much of the film's 80 minute running time acting like a moron. The point comes where it's not funny, as charming and likable an actor as Buster can be. It is also very odd that the script did not use the fact that his character is a professor and presumably a learned and intelligent fellow to drive the storyline. The plots of the Keaton silents - Our Hospitality, The Navigator, Go West, The General and Steamboat Bill. Jr. in particular - were not driven by idiocy by his characters. This tendency is deadly in the MGMs and begins as early as The Cameraman.
The production executive in charge of the Keaton MGM films, Lawrence Weingarten, later the producer of everything from Spencer Tracy - Katharine Hepburn vehicles to Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, along with the other execs, proved utterly and completely baffled by Buster Keaton.
Buster would have scoffed at the very idea of his silent features possessing “epic,” “mythic” and “poetic” qualities and insisted he was just trying to make a good picture, no big deal - but this is the area where the MGM films after The Cameraman (and especially the talkies) are sorely lacking. The sense of grandeur and scale is gone. Man against a cyclone. Man against a locomotive. Man against something he doesn’t understand. The settings and situations are scaled down, indoors. Buster is no longer a mere blip in the wide open spaces.
While there is a segment with Buster running around and doing his customary mindboggling stunts at a train station in Speak Easily, he is definitely earthbound. As noted in my review of Parlor, Bedroom and Bath for the first Buster Keaton Blogathon, in the MGM talkies, The Great Stone Face is stuck delivering dialogue as opposed to battling with forces far more powerful than himself. While Buster is a very good actor and his Midwestern sound suits his characters, he is much diminished by this. One wonders if the MGM executives other than Irving Thalberg ever actually watched Our Hospitality, The General and Steamboat Bill, Jr. Even the subsequent low-budget Educational Pictures short subjects as Grand Slam Opera get a little more Buster in the mix!
The storyline of Speak Easily casts Buster as an isolated, lonely and socially awkward college professor who receives a bogus letter stating that he shall receive a substantial inheritance: $750,000 in Great Depression money. Not knowing it's a ruse, the professor instantly opts to take a sabbatical from teaching and see the world. At the train station, Professor Potts by chance runs into a low-rent theatrical troupe and, thinking he's rich, pays for the entire cheesy company to take their cheesy musical review to Broadway! Cross-country hijinx, including aggressive pursuit of the incredibly naive academic by the troupe's gold digging diva/vamp, and a chaotic, disastrous, mishap-packed opening night ensue.
In the cast along with Buster, Jimmy Durante and Thelma Todd are actress Ruth Selwyn (who plays Buster's girlfriend Pansy Peets), columnist-to-be Hedda Hopper in a cameo as the overprotective Mrs. Peets, and character actor Sidney Toler.
Toler, between many successes on the stage and later in movies as the always three steps ahead super-sleuth Charlie Chan, does a fine job in his part as a nameless theatrical director, unendingly vexed by Professor Potts' penchant for jumping onstage at the worst possible times and wreaking holy havoc.
All of the above said, Speak Easily is not a bad movie by any means, has its moments throughout. There are several funny Pre-code bits - at one point Profesor Potts declares "I'll buy companionship" - and many involve Thelma Todd's vamp character.
Buster and Thelma create several very good sequences of physical comedy, most notably a variant on the dragging a drunk woman to bed routine that had previously been a cornerstone of Keaton’s last silent film, Spite Marriage, and would be performed two decades later by Buster and his wife Eleanor at the Cirque Medrano.
And then, can't finish this review without mentioning the topic of Buster co-starring with Jimmy Durante. . .
Buster said of Jimmy Durante's role in this film: "He was very good in the one picture we made together that had quality. I think this was because the character he played was very much like the real Jimmy Durante. The picture was Speak Easily, which...had a sound comedy plot." Buster and Jimmy are not teamed, but play off each other pretty well; yes, Jimmy is very loud but the two work together and Jimmy does not overpower Buster, the table salt and cayenne pepper contrast notwithstanding. Jimmy went to bat for Buster with MGM brass when Keaton did not show up on the set due to heavy drinking and the two comedians became lifelong friends offscreen.
The most interesting aspect of the film is how its "utter mayhem on stage" climax closely resembles another movie starring showbiz icons under the heading of "Comedians Who Got Screwed By MGM," the Marx Brothers. Watch both as a double bill and the parallels between are clear, right down to the bit in which Harpo swings across the stage, which Buster does in the scene of the Broadway show's disaster-filled opening, in which he ends up, quite unintentionally, as a comedy star and audience favorite. While there's no Margaret Dumont or Sig Ruman in Speak Easily, what the hey, it's funny.
This is not the only instance of something from a Buster Keaton movie turning up in A Night At The Opera, as a brief bit in The Cameraman appears to be the kernel of what would be expanded into the hilarious stateroom sequence of the Marx Brothers classic. Buster couldn't have worked on A Night At The Opera - he was alternating between overseas features and Educational Pictures 2-reelers at the time - and yet, there are a couple of instances of Keaton-esque moments in said film. When MGM re-hired Buster a few years later as a gagman and script doctor, he did, in what couldn’t have even a pleasant experience, work with the Marx Brothers; Groucho in particular did not welcome writers who weren’t named George Kaufman, S.J. Perelman, Harry Ruby or Arthur Sheekman, so this couldn’t have been fun for Buster.
Jimmy's next silver screen appearance at MGM would be in Blondie Of The Follies, a vehicle for one of the very few not named Marie Dressler who starred in funny and successful comedies bearing the MGM brand (not counting films produced by the Hal Roach Studio for MGM release) in the early talkie era - Marion Davies. Durante only has a couple of scenes, but the sweetness and genuine warmth underlying Jimmy's bluster and braggadocio is there - and would be the cornerstone of Schnozzola's comedy through several decades of movies and television.
Wrapping this up with a question. How would the Buster Keaton MGM talkies be evaluated if all his silents except Battling Butler and/or College, were lost films and hadn't been seen since 1928. Whatˇif Our Hospitality, Steamboat Bill, Jr. and The General had burned up in the Little Ferry, New Jersey vaults in 1937 (or in the "day the music burned" wipeout of MCA recorded masters in 2008)?
Would Keaton's MGM talkies still be considered to be debacles, horrible wastes of Keaton's talent or regarded as decent 1930's comedies which do not make proper use of The Great Stone Face's acting, directing and filmmaking talents? None of the Keaton MGM talkies are masterpieces, even on par with MGM's William Powell and Myrna Loy comedies, but are any, other than Free and Easy, unwatchable disasters? We'll think about that while preparing to watch Sherlock Jr. after several short subjects produced for MGM release by the Hal Roach Studio, including several of the first tier films of Speak Easily co-star Thelma Todd.
The International Buster Keaton Society (A.K.A. the Damfinos) hosts a convention paying tribute to Buster every October in Muskegon, Michigan and are both sponsoring this blogathon and donating a $50 giftcard to their Buster Stuff store.
Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog shall make a return visit to the dreaded Keaton MGM talkies. Shall take a look at the 1932 film Speak Easily, co-starring The Great Stone Face with ubiquitous comedienne of the early 1930's Thelma Todd and vaudeville star Jimmy Durante, at that time making the transition to movies.
A Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog favorite among those fearless standup comedians active in the 20th century and still going 20 years in the 21st century (Stephen Wright, Norm MacDonald, Louis Black and Chris Rock among them), remains the one, the only Gilbert Gottfried, comic, cartoon voice artist and character actor who celebrates his 65th birthday today. Starting today's post: Gilbert's part in Beverly Hills Cop.
Here are two prime clips of Gilbert's wild and original standup comedy from back in the 1980's, the latter one of his many appearances on Late Night With David Letterman.
Gilbert's comedy is NSFW, hilariously funny and in the Dirty Jokes Hall Of Fame (along with LaWanda Page, Redd Foxx and Robert Schimmel).
We at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog are also unabashed fans of the wonderful and old school show biz-obsessed Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast featuring Gilbert and his co-host, broadcaster, journalist and writer Frank Santopadre.
Thank you to the Gottfrieds (Gilbert and his wife and podcast producer Dara) and Frank for doing this. The 300th episode aired earlier this week!
It is far and away the funniest and most entertaining of all podcasts.
As far as Gilbert's role as Iago the Parrot in the 1992 Walt Disney cartoon feature Aladdin goes, the surprise is that it took so long for someone in animation to offer Gilbert a job as a voice artist.
Could we imagine Gilbert contributing voices to The Ren & Stimpy Show? Yes, definitely.
Stop-motion animation, from Cohl to Bowers to O'Brien to Starewicz to Pal to Harryhausen to the Quay brothers, has been on this movie buff's mind of late. Charley Bowers remains a favorite!
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George Pal always pleases.
For stop-motion animation genius, the Dutch Vintage Animation website is quite a treasure trove.
Quite a few terrific stop-motion films of Joop Geesink can be found here and on the stop-motion master's You Tube channel.
Have posted several commercials from Joop Geesink's Dollywood studio on this blog before. They are excellent and in the tradition of George Pal's animated mini-musicals for Philips and experimental animator Oskar Fischinger's Murrati Cigarette ads.
The Dollywood studio's commercial for White Horse Whisky ranks atop the list of most amazing, beautifully designed and imaginative ads. Do not show at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting - that would be a very bad idea, as even the most prim teetotaler would be amenable to downing a couple of shots after watching it.
Rather amazed that the Kinex studio's stop-motion films entirely escaped me for decades, at least until the release of a couple of Kinex short subjects, starring Chip the Wooden Man, on the now out-of-print 2010 Stop-Motion Marvels DVD collection.
Hear there shall be a Stop Motion Marvels 2 later this year from Thunderbean, so hopefully a few more discoveries from Kinex (and stop-motion animator John Burton) will be available then.
Until that Blu-ray release brings further discoveries, here is an indescribable 1933 short subject created by New Zealand filmmaker/painter/animator/sculptor Len Lye and on the first Stop Motion Marvels collection. It features a song well known by the gang at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog from a 1933 Max Fleischer Screen Song cartoon and melodious renditions by Louis Armstrong and Django Reinhardt. Lye's love of music, paramount in his subsequent GPO experimental films A Colour Box, Rainbow Dance and Trade Tattoo, combines with way-out imagery here.
Acknowledgements and many thanks to the Cartoon Research website and its Thunderbean Thursdays feature for links in this post that didn't come from the Dutch Vintage Animation page. Also extend a respectful tip of the Jimmie Hatlo hat to a YouTube channel which, among hundreds of 1920's, 1930's and 1940's animated films, includes a playlist of Charley Bowers.
A happy droplet among much horribleness so far in 2020 is fantastic news on the classic comedy movie front. Harry Langdon and Laurel & Harry collections are on the way later this year - and a Kickstarter is underway to fund a comedy compilation of films starring the great star of the British stage and movies (both in England and America), Lupino Lane.
This very worthy Kickstarter, funding a compilation using ultra-rare 35mm prints from international archives, deserves enthusiastic support!
The double-jointed acrobatic comedian starred for decades on the London stage and music halls. When the young "Nipper" Lane played the music halls, he was one of Stan Laurel's boyhood idols. Born on June 16, 1892, Lane was exactly two years younger than Stan.
Among the greatest pure physical comics to appear in movies, Lane starred in truly wonderful silent two-reel comedies throughout the 1920's.
The diminutive comedian performs seemingly impossible stunts, over and over and over!
Producer and organizer Dave Glass elaborates on the Lupino Lane Collection's contents:
“We’re delighted to say that we have some exceptional prints (most are 2K scans of nitrate) of some VERY rare films.
Through the generosity of Serge Bromberg and Lobster Films, Elif & Co at the EYE Film Museum and Patrick Stanbury (Photoplay) we present the following films:
Hello Sailor (1927) (one of the special event hits at the Pordenone Film Festival in 2019)
If you are not familiar with Mr. Lane, here he is in a scene from The Love Parade co-starring the charming singer-dancer-actress-comedienne Lillian Roth. Yes, that is theLillian Roth; she was subsequently cast in the Marx Brothers opus Animal Crackers as a punishment for rowdy on-set behavior in the making of her previous film, Madame Satan.
If that example of Lane's comedy does not convince you of his brilliance as a comedian and acrobat, here's another one: a duo routine with the equally talented icon of stage and screen, comedienne Beatrice Lillie.
After his career in American movies ended, Lane would be synonymous with British entertainment, star in English movies, as well as the musical stage hits, Me & My Girl. Lupino led the famous Lambeth Walk dance number, which he sings at 1:36 in the following clip.
There, he would remain an preeminent star of the stage and enjoy renewed prestige as one of England's premier show business icons.
Happily, the initial goal to get this off the starter's blocks has been met. The Kickstarter runs to March 13.
The gang at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog encourages supporting this, as more comedy rarities could be added to the Blu-ray/DVD collection.
Until then, Mr. Lane, bully and thanks for a million laughs!
It's Valentine's Day and nothing is more romantic than a crooner. The very personification of the word would be Our Gang's Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer.
Alfalfa's inspiration, without a doubt, was Bing Crosby. Alfalfa wasn't alone in that assessment - none other than Mel Tormé recorded "Learn To Croon."
And Frank Sinatra Jr. waxed the definitive version of the Gumby theme song.
The Brits were most inspired by the English Bing - the gifted and uber-romantic tenor Al Bowlly.
Even Bing may concede that Mr. Bowlly waxed the killer version of "The Very Thought Of You." The April 17, 1941 death of Mr. Bowlly in a airstrike on St. James's, London would be an incalculable loss to the arts and the world - as were the untimely World War II related passings of Carole Lombard and Leslie Howard.
Crooners started appearing in movies practically the moment talkies sent silents into the rear view mirror. The popular crooner and radio star Rudy Vallee was featured in the 1929 Eddie Cantor vehicle Glorifying The American Girl.
Rudy Vallee received the ultimate tribute: to appear in a Max Fleischer Screen Song cartoon starring Betty Boop.
Rudy and Bing Crosby inspired Cartoonland in no uncertain terms!
Taking cues from Bing, Cubby Bear was a singing radio star and one-bear band in the Van Beuren cartoon Croon Crazy!
Der Bingle was such a popular recording artist and movie star in the mid-1930's that Friz Freleng made a series of Merrie Melodies starring preening, narcissistic Bing Crosby roosters preying upon naive backwoods country hens and behaving like cocks (as well as knaves, scoundrels, rapscallions and cheeky bounders). This may have been a response to a mid-1930's trend in poultry-based animated cartoons that Disney's Silly Symphony Cock O'The Walk - an extended Busby Berkeley production number starring a cast of chickens - initiated with considerable style and a musical nod to "La Carioca" from Flying Down To Rio.
Not at all thrilled about these characterizations, Bing, with Paramount Pictures sued to get the Leon Schlesinger studio to stop making cartoons starring rapacious albeit cowardly crooners.
Bing and Paramount didn't win their court case, but the last of the trio of cartoons Friz Freleng and crew produced on the "city slicker seducing a star-struck country hen" theme, A Star Is Hatched, featured a movie director, not a crooner. It was also, due to the additions of music director Carl W. Stalling and voice characterization wiz Mel Blanc to the studio, a much snappier and funnier cartoon.
Crooners still would permeate music in 1930's movies, TV, radio and cartoons - none more than in I Love To Singa, the jaunty Merrie Melodie cartoon directed by Tex Avery.
With the unprecedented popularity and rise to entertainment superstar of Frank Sinatra just a few years later in the early 1940's, crooners soon were everywhere in cartoons.
EVERYBODY made cartoons inspired by "Frankie" - and this went on for a few years.
Without a doubt, the best of the best spoofs of crooners and the hysteria surrounding them (not at all surprisingly) were made by the comic geniuses at Warner Brothers animation.
As usual, getting the last word on the swooner crooner phenomenon, Tex Avery made a cartoon at MGM that combines a Sinatra spoof with a romantic polecat very much unlike Chuck Jones' over confident Charles Boyer skunk, Pepe LePew. The parody of 1940's bobbysoxers includes a bit with crooner-obsessed bunnies hitting each other over the head with other crooner-obsessed bunnies. Lil' Tinker is also, most uncharacteristically for Mr. Avery, a rather sweet and romantic cartoon, in addition to being ROFL hilarious.
Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog must finish this post by noting that our favorite crooner of all time, hands and microphones down, remains Bill Murray as "Nick the Lounge Singer" performing music from the movies!
Having watched beautifully made, brilliantly executed, sensitively acted, cosmically claustrophobic and mega-dark international noirs at the 18th Noir City Film Festival, this cinephile is now ready for some LAUGHS!
Happy to hear that there shall be, officially released on February 18 and now available for pre-order, a new Blu-ray of comedy gems created by Tex Avery, A.K.A. The King Of Cartoons.
Nobody could deliver belly laughs in mass quantities quite like Tex!
Soon after joining the Warner Brothers cartoon studio in 1935, Tex brought the animated cartoon business out of the post-Production Code of 1934 enforcement (and Disney envy) doldrums.
Tex, previously an animator for Walter Lantz' studio, immediately overturned the paradigm at Leon Schlesinger's studio by introducing a different, fast and imaginative brand of cartoon humor. His crew (Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, Virgil Ross and Sid Sutherland) set up shop a bit away from the main WB animation studio in a place called Termite Terrace and set to work making funny cartoons.
The Looney Tunes made in Termite Terrace gleefully broke the fourth and fifth walls and acknowledged to the moviegoing audience that "this is a cartoon!"
In this new breed of rowdy Looney Tunes, it was not merely okay but a mission to make cartoons that were not just cute like the Silly Symphonies/Happy Harmonies but actually funny.
Avery subsequently created Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny, with enthusiastic contributions from animators Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett.
This new Blu-ray concentrates on the films Tex made after leaving WB and joining the MGM cartoon studio, where he would create a host of original and indelible characters there, led by the phlegmatic Droopy Dog, whose trademark line was "you know what - I'm happy, or "you know what - that makes me MAD!"
Every one of Avery's characters and cartoons utterly baffled MGM cartoon producer Fred Quimby.
Tops, both back in WW2 and now, would be the 1943 Red Hot Riding Hood, still the short subject to earn the most rentals ever, especially to a humor-and-pulchritude starved G.I. audience.
Had Tex a percentage of the profits from the "Red" cartoons, he'd have retired a gazillionaire.
The lineup of cartoons on this Blu-ray is as follows:
Red Hot Riding Hood – 1943
Who Killed Who – 1943
What’s Buzzin’ Buzzard – 1943
Dumb-Hounded – 1943
Batty Baseball – 1944
Screwball Squirrel – 1944
Big Heel-Watha – 1944
The Screwy Truant – 1945
The Hick Chick – 1946
Lonesome Lenny – 1946
Hound Hunters – 1947
Red Hot Rangers – 1947
Bad Luck Blackie – 1949
Wags to Riches – 1949
The Garden Gopher – 1950
The Peachy Cobbler – 1950
The Chump Champ – 1950
Symphony in Slang – 1951
Daredevil Droopy – 1951
Tex Avery's Screwball Classics (volume 1) can be ordered here. We at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog sincerely hope that this collection sells like hotcakes served with rich creamery butter and genuine maple syrup at the MGM commissary and compels Warner Archive to release a volume 2 which will include the aforementioned Swing Shift Cinderella and other hilarious Tex Avery MGM cartoons not on volume 1. Classic comedy fans - you know what to do!
Well, they will more than do for a couple of months until the official release of the Harry Langdon Hal Roach talkies DVD set by Sprocket Vault Classic Films in April.
