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.)