Hate Review: Free and Easy (1930)

 

Generally, this is a blog for celebrating things I love – Who, Sondheim, the Avengers, and so on.  As I’ve said, I like liking things, and I like writing about things I like.  But this is a potent bit of appalling that I simply have to rant about.  Spoilers ahead.  (Also, length warning:  ire is wordy.)

 

I’ve seen Free and Easy, Buster Keaton’s first talkie, before.  I watched it years ago, when I first got into Buster and a load of his movies were on TCM.  I remember thinking it wasn’t very funny, that it was nothing compared to his silent stuff.  I remember noticing that it didn’t let Buster do what he did best – it was all jokes, many of them labored, and hardly any physical comedy.  On the few occasions when he did get to tumble, the focus wasn’t on his slapstick skill but on the tremendous crashing noise picked up by the super-sensitive 1930s microphones.

 

So, unfunny, didn’t use its star well, and clunky sound technology – that’s what I remembered.  But I didn’t know as much about Buster’s history then as I knew now.  I knew he didn’t do well during the transition to sound, but I blamed it on the culture of talkies, a cinematic obsession with dialogue over action.  I didn’t understand the changeover that accompanied this transition:  against his better judgment, Buster signed with MGM, after which he lost all his independence and creative control as an actor, writer, and director.  The Cameraman and Spite Marriage, his first two studio films, feel off compared to his previous work, but Free and Easy is just horrific. 

 

While Buster was still an uncredited director in the two preceding films, on Free and Easy, he was only there to act.  The arguments that wrestled Bustery gags and touches into the other two movies were absent here.  In fact, watching it now, I can practically hear MGM putting Buster in his place after defying them.  It’s utterly un-Buster, trading all creativity for heaps of indignity.

 

Buster’s go-to arc in his own films is as follows:  a boy starts out clumsy, kicked around by circumstance, and grows into a quick-footed hero who saves the day and the girl by his doggedness and inventive problem-solving.  Free and Easy, on the other hand, gives us Kansas yokel turned would-be Hollywood manager Elmer Butts, a bumbling dope who can’t be talked through the recital of a single sentence.  Elmer’s klutziness isn’t his chief fault – rather, it’s an uncanny ability to bring disaster to everything he touches.  He ruins numerous takes on multiple movies that he isn’t even in, and while his good-hearted budding starlet (the girl for this film) takes his catastrophes in stride, her strong-arming mother constantly tells Elmer how stupid he is.

 

The one Busteresque thread is that Elmer does make good in the end, though not at what he sets out to do.  All attempts to find work for his starlet are utter nonstarters, but for whatever reason, people keep throwing movie roles of various size his way, and it’s ultimately decided that he’s a comic genius destined to become a big star.  He doesn’t try to become an actor and doesn’t really want to be one, but it happens as everything does to Elmer:  foisted upon him with very little say.

 

And that, of course, brings us right back to being un-Buster.  Elmer isn’t resourceful or tenacious.  He doesn’t solve a single problem that he has – eight or nine times out of ten, he makes it infinitely worse just by showing up, and on the off-chance that things turn out, it’s because that’s how the wind blows.  Case in point:  when Elmer, his starlet, and her mother leave Kansas for Tinseltown, he’s separated from them on the train.  Since he has their tickets, he wants to get back to them, but after a few weak protests to the conductor who won’t let him change cars, what does he do?  Distract the conductor and slip by?  Jump off the train, take a shortcut to race ahead, and leap back on?  Scramble on top of the train and get in from above?  Nope.  He sits down to make awkward small talk with the conductor until he’s allowed to change cars at the next stop.  Seriously?!  Even if you don’t want him to succeed, at least have him try.

 

I mentioned indignity earlier, which might seem a weird complaint in the context of slapstick, but it’s true.  Normally, Buster’s tumbling is so eye-catchingly hilarious and impressive that it’s clear he’s the man.  When he falls, he falls spectacularly, flipping through the air and landing on a shoulder with flailing limbs everywhere.  And more than that, he springs back up, climbing and leaping his way out of trouble with an expression of calm in the face of the chaos around him.  Nothing undignified about that.  Not so with Elmer.  When he falls, he disappears from frame and we’re left to see others laugh at him or look embarrassed on his behalf.  In the one segment where he’s allowed to tumble capably and athletically, he’s painted with clown makeup and wearing enormous “comic” trousers, as if MGM doesn’t want you to notice what he can do.

 

After literally dressing him as a harlequin clown, rigging him with strings, and making him do a puppet dance (geez, why not just whack him with a hammer that says “We own you, Buster – never cross us again?”), Free and Easy makes its final departure from Buster’s usual arc:  for the first time in a feature film, he doesn’t get the girl.  Oh, Elmer works up the nerve to declare his love for the starlet, in a roundabout “What would you do if someone said he loved you?” way.  The starlet assumes he’s talking about the suave, womanizing movie star with his eye on her, and because this movie hates Buster Keaton, it ends, not with her realizing her mistake and opening her eyes to the guy who’s only ever tried (and, albeit, failed) to help her, but with her getting engaged to the movie star and Elmer putting on a tragically brave face under the clown makeup.

 

I mean, what the frak?!  Who ends a comedy like that?  That’s a third-act pre-resolution mishap at best, and not even a very original one.  It smacks of such ignorance – about movies, about comedy, about underdog stories, and about Buster.  I don’t get how anyone could have conceived it as anything other than a “you’ll do what we tell you” slap in the face of its assertive lead actor. 

 

It’s just gross.  This is a film that takes everything Buster wove into cinematic magic for nearly a decade and takes a crap on it.  Later, when I get around to posting a poem I wrote about Buster’s time at MGM, think of this review.  Metro Goldwyn Morons.