Buster Keaton – 65th Anniversary Collection
November 7th, 2009
{features}
Amazon.com
If one dials down expectations, some of the Columbia shorts (around 16-17 minutes long) are enjoyable in the baggy-pants style of the Three Stooges. And when it comes to searching for signs of the old Keaton, there are usually one or two blossoms poking out of the overall bluntness. Mooching through Georgia, a Civil War spoof, has moments of silent hilarity and a Keatonesque note of fatalism as Buster is marched to his own execution. Nothing but Pleasure has a terrific sequence involving a drunk woman who wanders into Buster’s motel room, and Buster’s efforts to get her into a Murphy bed. She’s Oil Mine features a breathtaking gag in which Keaton is spun around like a tire iron in order to get a pipe unstuck from his finger. Keaton, in his mid-40s, is still in athletic form, although thanks to alcohol and disappointment he looks older than his years.
Commentaries adorn the shorts, and there’s a useful 25-minute documentary giving the general outline of Keaton’s life and details on the Columbia arrangement. It’s refreshingly honest about the mixed quality of these films, and contains excerpts from his silent shorts that suggest how far the genius had slipped. In that sense, while this DVD package honorably presents a moment from film history (and with fine technical specs all around), the actual watching of these shorts is tinged with sadness. The casual moviegoer curious about Keaton should go elsewhere; the completist will want it; the amateur historian will want to give a look to see what the “missing years” were all about. –Robert Horton
Product Description
Posted in Products
Finally somebody recognizes this brilliant comedian’s work at Columbia Pictures!
After producing some mildly amusing comedy shorts at Educational Pictures, Buster got his chance to work again for a major studio. Columbia was the haven for comedians in the late 1930’s & 1940’s, they were #1 in producing comedy shorts at this time! Sure, these don’t compete with Buster’s classic, self produced, silent comedies of the 1920’s. But these are not to be missed by fans. This has been a somewhat lost part of Buster’s cinema history. HOOORAY!!!
Here are the 10 Buster Keaton Columbia Pictures comedy shorts that Sony owns:
1939
Pest from the West
Mooching Through Georgia
1940
Nothing But Pleasure
Pardon My Birthmarks
The Taming of the Snood
The Spook Speaks
His Ex Marks the Spot
1941
So You Won’t Squawk
General Nuisance
She’s Oil Mine
After these enjoyable 17 minute comedies were made, Buster was reduced to being just an extra, the comedy relief, in feature films.
I am glad to see that Sony has finally recognized that the 3 Stooges aren’t the only comedy short classics they own.
A treat for Keaton Fans. Not his best work, but some very entertaining moments can be found in these shorts.
Keaton made some of the funniest, most inventive, and witty silent shorts and features of all time. He didn’t just come up with a smart sight gag, he played with audience expectations and often found an extra twist. Along the way he experimented with camera tricks, techniques and much more. He wasn’t merely a clown, but an artist. Many already know this.
In the late 1920’s and early 1930s, Keaton was under contract to MGM. They took away a lot of his creative control and forced him to star in stage adaptations and team up with Jimmy Durante in a couple of movies. Keaton was having some personal problems as well, and his drinking was out of control. The movies weren’t funny, weren’t popular and he was more and more difficult to work with. His career was at a low point by the mid 1930s. He was let go from MGM.
By the late 1930s he had stopped drinking and his personal life was much happier. Columbia convinced him to do a series of sound shorts under the direction of people like Del Lord and Jules White. The shorts were made between 1939 to 1941 at Columbia Pictures utilizing the same crews and directors as Columbia’s 3 Stooges shorts. Keaton fans will find a still very agile 45 year acrobatic Keaton able to create magic moments. The budgets were small and the shooting schedule was usually confined to 3 days. Some of the shorts were not written with Keaton in mind, but there are moments in every single offering where Keaton’s skill and experience shine.
Ten shorts have been collected on the two discs (they are not arranged chronologically here-who knows why) among the gems are Pest from the West (a solid abridged remake of the mostly awful feature film he did in the U.K. called: “The Invader ” aka “An Old Spanish Custom). He re-stages part of his old vaudeville act in the short “Taming of the Snood”. There’s a very funny Keaton classic routine (with a slight twist) in “Nothing but Pleasure”. A wonderful little bit of dance choreography makes “General Nuisance” enjoyable, “So You Won’t Squawk” has several fun sequences and good use of a stock chase scene, and the best of the shorts is the last one he did for Columbia called “She’s Oil Mine” which finishes off with one of the best versions he’s ever done of his famous `duel scene’.
These were cheap quickly made comedies cranked out by Columbia’s short division. The schedule frustrated Keaton who felt with a few more shooting days on each short he could have improved them. They wanted him to make more, but he decided to not re-new his contract. He successfully stopped drinking, found a life partner, and led a modest life behind the scenes (writing gags for other stars-particularly Red Skeleton) for nearly a decade. Then by the 1950s he had been re-discovered and made many appearances on television, did numerous live shows and eventually made industrial films, appeared in small roles in several movies, and was moved by how many people re-discovered and enjoyed his old silent films.
The DVD’s include commentaries by a few film scholars and genuine fan club folks that run on each of the shorts. They give you some interesting perspective and some fun trivia notes if you care to listen to them. For the DVD collection a new mini-documentary was created that gives a retrospective of Keaton’s transition from silent movies to MGM talkies to the making of these Columbia shorts. The documentary takes the honest view that these films were not nearly as good as the silent shorts and while entertaining, Keaton was not proud of his work on these with the exception of “Pest from the West’ and `She’s Oil Mine’.
Don’t expect the best of Keaton here, but if you are a fan, there’s a lot here to enjoy. Good value for the money provided you know what to expect.
After years of trying and pleading with his superiors, SONY V.P. of repertory Michael Schlessinger has finally persuaded the powers that be to release on DVD, the TEN Keaton shorts the Great Stone Face made at Columbia Pictures. With careful attention to detail, the chief restorationist, Grover Crisp has made the negs as clean as possible and have transferred these long neglected treasures to a quality they never knew in original release.
Who cares is some of the material is not up to Buster’s best work. There are moments of brilliance in these comedies that rival anything Keaton did in the sound era. His “The Pest From The West” is his Columbia masterpiece and worth the price of this DVD set alone. There are also some wonderful comedies here that never get to see the light of day anymore. “The Spook Speaks” is a riot as Buster and Elsie Ames are caretakers in a house that is supposed to be haunted complete with moving furniture and a penguin that enjoys a good stiff drink now and then. “She’s Oil Mine”, has Buster in a duel for the girl he loves. Several of these films contain some reworking of Keaton’s earlier silent films and they are fun and interesting to see. There is commentary from Keaton experts / fans and even a note from Keaton’s granddaughter.
Kudos to SONY for making the complete set available and to Mr. Schlessinger for spearheading the campaign to get them released. Now if this set sells well, perhaps Columbia can be persuaded into releasing other shorts from some of the other series they made….like Charley Chase, Andy Clyde and the musical novelties that are never seen anymore.