The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Sidewalks of New York (1931)

Yep, it’s time for another Buster Keaton MGM talkie.  Despite a fine performance from Buster, I can see why he didn’t like it – the plot is sloppy and overly complicated, and pretty much every scene not involving Buster just isn’t funny.  It’s not aggressively bad, but it’s incredibly “meh,” far below Buster’s talents.

Basically, the story is that Buster’s Mr. Harmon is a wealthy man who, having fallen in love with a woman who lives in a tenement he owns, sets out to improve the lot of the guttersnipes of the city.  This involves, variously, a public gymnasium, a boxing match, and a ridiculous play, and there’s a bungled-yet-inventive proposal thrown in for good measure.  (Harmon is interesting in that he’s really not like any of Buster’s rich dandies.  He’s a little naïve and misguided, but he isn’t entirely dependent on servants to get by – while he relies a lot on his subordinate Mr. Poggle, it’s more because he gets tongue-tied or bewildered than because he doesn’t know how to fend for himself.)

The Good – There’s some decent physical comedy from Buster, nice tumbling and a few lengthy routines.  I especially like the extended chase/fight sequence at the end, and I always love the muay thai-ish move where he launches himself at someone to kick them in the chest.  There are funny gags outside of the slapstick as well – there’s a great scene of Harmon trying to carve a duck and some excellent laughs when he takes the stand in a court case.  Harmon and Poggle (Cliff Edwards, who had a similar sidekick role in Doughboys) make an amusing team, and I like that Harmon is decently industrious.  He often gets things wrong, but he never really stops trying.  Also, while I’m not crazy about Margie as a love interest, Harmon’s reactions to her are terrific.  Buster always plays smitten so well – really funny and sweet.

The Bad – Like Parlor, Bedroom and Bath, this film feels, tonally, like two movies stitched together, but while the former combines slapstick with bedroom farce, this one seems to combine slapstick with melodrama.  There’s this whole big subplot with Margie’s younger brother as a hoodlum getting swept up in a life of crime, with Margie of course desperate to save him.  These scenes are big and overwrought, and they feel out of place beside Buster’s comedy.  Also, the narrative feels really cobbled together.  Lots of stuff appears to happen just cuz, with no logical purpose.  For instance, this isn’t the first Buster film to feature a disastrous theatrical performance, but these sequences fit organically into movies like Back Stage, Spite Marriage, and Speak Easily.  The films build up to them such that the onstage hijinks are the natural conclusion.  Here, the play is shoved in so haphazardly that I honestly don’t know the in-story reason that it’s happening.

The Ugly – Like I said, Harmon shows some good initiative and drives a solid chunk of the action, but there a few scenes that veer uncomfortably into the dopey persona that started in this era.  I mentioned that Harmon taking the stand is greatly comedic, but Harmon on the stand isn’t much fun; he’s way too dumb, and since he’s not characterized that way for the brunt of the film, it’s more aggravating when the script starts knocking off brain cells at random.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Spanish Apartment – The Ugly

It’s a shame that The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is set up to descend in quality, because each review gets further from the film’s good qualities.  Still, we’re finishing up today with my last post on The Spanish Apartment, and it’s the grimmest of the lot:  the ugly.  (Note:  some spoilers for this film and its sequel, Russian Dolls.)  The good news is that it’s not overwhelming.  I didn’t pick up on it the first few viewings, and even then, you see similar issues in (far too) many films, but it’s disappointing to see in a film that has so much to love.  Isn’t that always the way?  In this case, the issue is how it handles female characters.  Virtually every major woman in the film is written mostly in service of Xavier.  Now, it’s his story, and he’s obviously the focal point and the most fleshed-out character, but the women, more so than the men, are characterized in problematic gender ways.  This is especially true with Martine, Anne-Sophie, and Isabelle.

To start, I’ll point out that all three have shading outside their relationships with Xavier.  Anne-Sophie is a repressed newlywed afraid to venture out into her new country.  Isabelle has a girlfriend, pride in her Walloon identity, and strong opinions.  Even Martine, the thinnest of the three, has her own thoughts and emotions.  However, all three serve a much larger, less nuanced purpose in Xavier’s story.  Anne-Sophie is taken with Xavier almost from the get-go.  She appears lingerie-clad in Xavier’s subconscious and otherwise, her weak rebuff of his advances crumbles at his romantic prowess, and when they begin an affair, her recent marriage is so far from her thoughts that she keeps trying to paw at Xavier even when her husband is home.  Similarly, though Isabelle is gay and, as such, out of the running as a bedmate, the film continually goes to the “hot lesbian” well with her, always for Xavier’s benefit.  He’s the only one to hear her story of being hit on at a dance class, and she gives him a how-to in seducing women, first demonstrating on him and later enlisted her girlfriend for an exhibition.  Furthermore, her lingering glances and comments that it’s “a shame” he’s not a girl feed into het-male fantasies of “turning” a lesbian.  Finally, Martine is Xavier’s girlfriend, but she only plays a part in the film when it’s convenient.  When he needs a push into another woman’s arms, she’s judgmental of his new friends and nags him over the phone, and when he needs an emotional struggle, she obligingly pops up to break his heart with news that she’s been seeing someone.

I should note that Xavier never feels the least bit bad about cheating on Martine or cuckolding Anne-Sophie’s husband, but when he hears that Martine has stepped out on him, it’s all sad music, wallowing, and tearful stares at a photograph of them.  It’s all about his pain and her betrayal, no sense of regret or understanding.  Worse, the film never really acknowledges this as a problem.  No one points out that Xavier was in fact cheating on her and helping another woman cheat on someone else, and maybe he doesn’t have much license to throw a pity party.

It’s interesting, because almost all the female characters are more detailed than the non-Xavier males, but their storylines tend to hinge on their romantic entanglement with/ability to titillate him.  It’s a bit of a camouflage – because they’re rounder, you might not notice it at first, but once you do, it’s unmistakable.  Wendy, who mostly escapes this gendered focus, is admittedly pretty well fleshed-out; however, while she’s not really on Xavier’s romantic or sexual radar in this movie, she becomes a major contender in Russian Dolls.  It’s also noteworthy, I think, that Soledad, the one woman with a solid boyfriend she remains faithful to, is definitely the one with the least shading.  Is it because we know nothing will happen between her and Xavier? 

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Spanish Apartment – The Bad

The Spanish Apartment is an interesting movie to write about because, as much as I connect with it, admire the stylish direction, and adore the characters, its problematic areas are glaring.  It kind of floors me that a film can succeed so much at some things and stumble just as greatly at others.  Today, we have the second of three posts about this oddly contentious movie.

I mentioned yesterday how much I love the cultural clutter of this film.  I like the way the disparate roommates are so surprisingly functional amidst their chaos, the way the different languages and values sit alongside each other.  The movie does so well with this comfortable, if noisy, melding – it feels absolutely genuine, so understated and natural.

So, it’s startling when the theme of more specific cultural clash in the film is so overdrawn and heavy-handed.  This element largely comes through the introduction of Wendy’s brother William – not a student, William has been traveling Europe and comes to stay with the group while he’s in Spain.  He’s boorish and tactless, and his first night in the apartment introduces the whole gang to his preferred source of loudmouth humor:  national stereotypes.  Yes, he’s immature and self-assured, a dangerous combination, but he demonstrates first an utter inability to read the obvious discomfort of the room and later an insistent refusal to accept overt chastisement.

It’s unpleasant to watch him monologue about how “Spanish people do this” and “German people do this” and so on, and Wendy goes down in my estimation when she doesn’t put a stop to it (the one instance where she really takes William to task, after a particularly hurtful incident with Tobias, she doesn’t hold her resolve for very long.)  The whole thing is coarse and too obvious, and since I’ve already established how wholly I’m in the roommates’ corner, it only serves to make William my enemy.  It doesn’t matter when he comes through for his sister later, because the damage has long since been done.

This business is especially clunky because of how overdone it is.  In all of William’s stupid “jokes,” he never says anything that even approaches funny-yet-distasteful.  Not that being funny gives prejudice a pass, but offense is frequently a part of humor and would at least allow his continued insistence on it to make a bit of sense.  However, these sequences are utterly humorless.  Literally, they involve nothing more than him spouting cultural generalizations, badly mimicking languages he doesn’t speak, and then laughing hysterically about it.  There’s no point to it, and if I were in the group’s place, the painful lack of humor would make it uncomfortable even without the ignorant bigotry.

None of this is helped by the fact that most of the characters are drawn pretty thinly along national lines.  Don’t get me wrong – I still adore them and the little details in the writing, and the actors breathe so much life into them that they feel a lot more fully realized than they are.  However, it’s no accident that, for example, Italian Alessandro could either be called laidback or lazy while German Tobias could be labeled either precise or anal retentive.  The occasions when William gets dressed down for his clichés are great, but they don’t land as well when you notice the boilerplate framework at the core of most of the characters.  There’s a line between cultural norms and cultural stereotypes, and the film sometimes ventures too close to the wrong side of it.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Spanish Apartment (2002, R) – The Good

This is the first time I’ve done a Good/Bad/Ugly write-up for something that’s not a Buster Keaton MGM film, so make of that distinction what you will.  However, I rewatched this film lately and was reminded of how massively flawed it is, and yet how there’s something about it I just love.

Xavier is a Parisian grad student who, wanting to make himself more employable, decides to spend a year in Barcelona going to school and becoming fluent in Spanish – global economy and all.  Along the way, he shares an apartment with an eclectic gaggle of international students, and somewhere in the multicultural hodgepodge, he starts to find himself.  Coming-of-age story on overdrive, it’s more of a journey than a story, but while it doesn’t always know where it’s headed, the vivid characters keep that journey engaging.

Because I have a lot more to say about the successes and sins of this movie than the likes of Speak Easily or Parlor, Bedroom and Bath, I’m dividing up my review over several days, and we’re starting with the best feet forward.  The direction is crisp and eye-catching, which goes a long way toward helping it stand out from other films of its kind.  I really like the creative audio/visual techniques thrown in; they give the film a lot of personality.

Xavier’s position as the film’s narrator is strong.  Sure, he has plenty of mid-20s identity angst, and he has his share of poor qualities (more on that another day,) but he’s supposed to be sort of searching and rudderless.  I like the way he gradually becomes part of Barcelona, the way the city adopts him and he stops being just a Parisian.  When his girlfriend comes to visit, it’s clear that they’ve already drifted – he’s changing so much so fast, and she’s stayed behind.

Without a doubt, though, I love this movie for its ensemble.  When Xavier is first interviewed as a prospective roommate, he’s enchanted by the other students, thinking, “It was like I’d always lived in this mess.”  He loves the noise of it all, the love and the squabbling, the multilingual mishmash and cultural potpourri that permeates the apartment.  Though most of his friends are drawn lightly without much shading, the whole experience feels so specific and lived-in.  Like Xavier, I can’t get enough of their camaraderie, and I love the confused way their conversation flits between languages.  I also like the many little touches to film paints of their dynamic, like the way their fridge organization system descends into entropy, or the cheat-sheet by the phone which says “So-and-so isn’t here” in each roommate’s native language.  Scatterbrained Alessandro, industrious Wendy, fastidious Tobias, lively Soledad, serious Lars, and outspoken Isabelle are absolutely the reason to see the film. 

While it’s firmly Xavier’s story, my favorite moments aren’t focused on him at all.  I love Tobias and Wendy discussing a personal matter in Spanish so her visiting brother won’t understand them.  I love Alessandro dancing down the street to class, the only person in the world for all he cares.  I love Wendy grumbling to herself when a fuse blows and it falls to her to sort things out.  I love Soledad riding on the handlebars of Lars’s bike, I love Isabelle squeezing herself onto an already-crowded couch, and I love the shot of them all peering out of Wendy’s bedroom Scooby Doo-style when Xavier is talking to the landlord.  For two hours, these characters are my Italian-English-German-Spanish-Danish-Belgian friends, and that’s fantastic.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Doughboys (1930)

Another Buster Keaton MGM talkie, one that happily continues my trend of “really not all that bad.”  It’s a bit like Speak Easily, a decent-ish, unremarkable film.  Though it has a few memorable scenes, its chief sin is that it squanders its biggest asset:  Buster.

If the name didn’t give it away, Doughboysis a World War I comedy (probably not many of those.)  Buster plays Elmer J. Stiverson, a less memorable echo of his rich dandies in The Navigator, Battling Butler, and The Saphead.  Trying to secure a new chauffeur, Elmer mistakes the recruiting office for the employment bureau and accidently enlists.  The silver lining is that Mary, the girl he loves, is there as well, entertaining the troops.  Even better, while she turned up her nose at him back home, her opinion has improved now that he’s a brave soldier going off to fight for freedom.  Now if only they can make it to France and back in one piece.

The Good – Although Elmer isn’t as funny or well-characterized as Rollo in The Navigator or Alfred in Battling Butler, he’s a great improvement over the dopes in Free and Easy and Parlor, Bedroom and Bath.  What’s more, he’s fairly resourceful and proactive; he holds his ground against his sneering drill sergeant and even plays a pretty clever joke on him.  It’s great to see Buster again playing someone who can make things happen in his own story.  I’m also a fan of Mary, who might be my favorite MGM love interest so far.  She’s cool and gorgeous, and she and Elmer have sweet chemistry together.  I like the nods to Buster’s own military service, like Elmer’s ill-fitting uniform (he looks like a 14-year-old in his dad’s suit,) and there are a few standout moments.  There’s a great scene of Elmer singing and playing the ukulele with some fellow soldiers that’s a lot of fun, and Buster’s wonderfully acrobatic performance as an impromptu drag act in the company show is a riot.  Some of the dancing in this scene is  reminiscent of his dance with Fatty Arbuckle in Back Stage, and it’s made even more fun by Elmer’s attempts to extricate himself from the situation.  A great sequence, and very Buster.

The Bad – As perfect and hilarious as Buster’s tumbling is in the drag routine, there’s far too little of it.  This film is woefully short on physical comedy, and what little there is mostly features Elmer tripping unimpressively over things, with none of the eye-catching twists, flips, and rolls that Buster does so well.  Quick example –in the recruiting office, Elmer resists taking his clothes off for the physical, and the military doctor has to forcibly strip him.  Amusing, but over in… maybe thirty seconds?  A handful of years later, Buster reused this idea for the short General Nuisance, and the half-clothed scuffle that results is hysterical.  Here, though?  Hardly anything.  Additionally, Elmer and Mary’s cute dynamic is hampered by tired misunderstanding-based conflicts.  More than anything, though, it’s just a bland movie.  It’s not hugely funny – for the most part, the comedy only elicits bemused chuckles (the physical comedy in the drag scene being the major exception, because that’s simply outstanding.)  It’s just there, nothing special.  Given Buster’s incredible comic talents, he’s wasted in this okay-but-unmemorable film.

The Ugly – Really, there’s nothing to report here, and that’s nice.  Although the film itself is too staid to merit a lot of praise, it’s a relief to see Buster in an MGM movie without any cringe-worthy moments.  This is perhaps the reason it was Buster’s favorite from this period; even though he has more comedic material in, say, Parlor, Bedroom and Bath or Speak Easily, there’s nothing in it that feels like it was specifically included to humiliate him or break his spirit.  Yay?

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Speak Easily (1932)

 

Thankfully, this Buster Keaton talkie is closer to Parlor, Bedroom and Bath than Free and Easy.  The unnecessary or objectionable stuff is kept to a minimum and, while it doesn’t reach the best moments of Parlor, Bedroom and Bath, it’s not nearly as uneven.  On the whole, it’s a pleasant enough little comedy, unremarkable but a decent way to spend a bit of time.  I can still see, though, why Buster remained unhappy at MGM.  They’re not all as atrocious as Free and Easy, but they don’t have to be; after the impeccable, astounding films he was making on his own, even a pleasant enough little comedy must have felt like such a comedown.

 

In Speak Easily, Buster is the stilted, pedantic Professor Post, a studious little man who’s led a lonely, even-keeled life.  When he receives notice of a sizeable inheritance, he lets his hair down for the first time ever.  He sets off on a cross-country trip, where he immediately falls in love with an actress on the train.  She’s in the company of a traveling revue and, since the professor is well-orderedly throwing caution to the wind, he decides to fund a move to Broadway with his newfound wealth.  Hijinks, mishaps, and miscommunications ensue, naturally, and everything culminates in an onstage climax that’s partially cribbed from Spite Marriagebut, in my opinion, a lot more fun.

 

The Good – I really enjoy Buster’s character here.  Mercifully, Professor Post isn’t the dimwit too many of his MGM characters are; though he’s socially awkward and not well-versed in the ways of the world, his encyclopedic knowledge gets plenty of screentime.  It’s a type of performance I haven’t seen from Buster before, and he does a nice job playing the punctilious professor.  He carries himself differently, and I like the stiff, overly-precise diction.  Beyond that, the romance is sweet, and the film doesn’t seem like it’s looking down its nose at Buster (how sad is it that is something worth noting?)  Oh, and the comic finale on Broadway offers plenty of laughs.  Putting the bookish professor in a ragtag theatrical setting is inherently humorous, Buster is great throughout the sequence, and the comedy really feels earned.

 

The Bad – The biggest strike here is just that the film isn’t much to write home about.  It’s not bad and, as I said, it’s not as inconsistent as Parlor, Bedroom and Bath, but it’s a little on the bland side.  Aside from the big performance at the end, there aren’t many standout moments.  Also, although I understand that Speak Easily is easily considered the best of the three movies Buster made with Jimmy Durante (he plays a gregarious actor in the company,) I’m still not a fan of Durante’s role.  It often feels like we’re moving along with our nice enough little story, throwing in some physical comedy for flavor, and then suddenly Jimmy Durante is yelling in my ear, possibly under the belief that he’s in a different movie.  It’s just a little too big, too insistent, and it doesn’t mesh well with Buster’s more fluid style.

 

The Ugly – Not a whole lot, phew.  The only real bit of ugliness comes in a scene where the professor gets unintentionally sloshed.  I’ve seen Buster play drunk before, of course, but never slurring, falling-down, stinking drunk, and knowing how much trouble Buster had with his real-life drinking around this time, it’s uncomfortable to watch and makes me feel sad rather than amused.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Parlor, Bedroom and Bath (1931)

 

Now that I’ve dipped my toes into Buster Keaton’s MGM years, I’m of course saddened and angered that they wasted his talent and intelligence so incredibly, but it’s not entirely tortuous.  I’m heartened to find that not everything is Free and Easy – as a fan of Buster’s, I’m interested in his work, but I don’t know how many Free and Easies I could take.  Going forward with the MGM talkies, I may hate review some, I may lump some with others into more general reviews, and some, like this one, I’ll divide into their good, bad, and ugly qualities.

 

Parlor, Bedroom and Bath, plot-wise, is a bit of a Prohibition-era Taming of the Shrew.  It concerns young Virginia, who doesn’t feel she can get married before Angelica, her strong-willed, extremely picky older sister, and the Virginia’s fiancée Jeff sets out to find Angelica a man.  Enter Reginald Irving, Buster’s character.  A timid sign tacker, Reggie comes into their lives when Jeff accidentally hits him with his car (Reggie, captivated by Angelica’s beauty, wanders doe-eyed into the street – oh, Buster) and he’s brought to the house to convalesce.  Angelica takes it upon herself to look after Reggie, and Jeff tries to stoke the fire by giving Reggie a reputation as a notorious womanizer – why that appeals to Angelica, I don’t know, but she eats it up.  Schemes, misunderstandings, and naughty-for-the-30s shenanigans ensue.

 

The Good – For a talkie, this film has tons of physical comedy.  Buster gets to do some fine tumbling, there are a few good chase scenes, and there’s a sequence of Reggie learning and then practicing the art of seduction that’s an absolute scream.  The last item might seem out of place in the same sentence as tumbles and chase scenes, but it’s in the right spot, trust me.  The “seduction” scene is incredibly physical and athletic (no, not like that,) and Buster is hysterical in it.  He’s especially good with Charlotte Greenwood, who plays a woman enlisted to help Reggie learn the ropes.  Beyond that, the movie has a lot of callbacks to Buster’s silent classics that, while not as funny as the originals, are lovely.  The train scene from One Week is repeated (albeit with a car instead of a house,) and one shot is a pale-but-delightful echo of the standing-on-shoulders sequence from Neighbors.  Finally, if you’re interested in Buster’s real life, this film is neat in that it was largely shot at the Italian Villa, his gorgeous Beverly Hills mansion.

 

The Bad – Reggie isn’t a very strong character; while not as bad as Elmer in Free and Easy, he’s easily pushed around and often at the whims and machinations of others.  Save for a few moments, he doesn’t cause much of the action to happen.  Rather, the action happens to him, and he’s just sort of along for the ride, stumbling along as best as he can.  Another sticking point is that the movie has a somewhat schizophrenic tone.  As I said, the physical comedy is terrific, but the film seems to shift between near-silent visual sequences and stretches of talk-talk-talk joke dialogue.  Not that wordy humor can’t be funny (love me some Fry & Laurie,) but the mix doesn’t feel organic.  The two types of comedy aren’t integrated well – it’s like the movie has a “joke switch” that it flips on and off at random.

 

The Ugly – One word:  stupid.  There’s a long, painful scene of Jeff instructing Reggie how to woo a woman, and as Reggie takes notes, we discover that he can’t spell, among other things, the word “coat.”  That happens.  And it’s supposed to be funny, but it’s just ugly.  (Especially since, though Buster was perfectly literate and a smart cookie with a flair for engineering, he had no formal education and was always self-conscious about it.  Way to be jerks, MGM.)