Buster Keaton: Post-MGM Film Work

I’ve already looked at short films Buster Keaton made after leaving MGM, as well as some of the TV work he did during his resurgence in the ‘50s and ‘60s.  His post-MGM film career – not counting Le roi des Champs-Élysées, which is fantastic – is a much more unfortunately-mixed bag than either of these.  While there’s some good to be found, much of it is nothing-to-write-home-about cameos, projects beneath his talents, and a few outright perplexing film choices.

Of the films I’ve seen, I’ll start with my favorites.  The Villain Still Pursued Her rises to the top because it’s a) funny, b) well-written, and c) relatively good to Buster.  A satire of Victorian morality plays, it’s nowhere near his usual wheelhouse, but he adapts well to the broad, winking silliness.  The film is about an honorable young man whose life and family are nearly ruined when a nefarious schemer tricks him into tasting a drop of alcohol and he’s addicted instantly.  Buster plays the fallen hero’s best friend, contributing to both the plot and the laughs.  I’m not sure what to make of Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight – with its potent mix of humor and sentiment, it’s a bit like a Dickens novel – but Buster’s short appearance as the comedy partner of Chaplin’s down-on-his-luck former entertainer, is easily the funniest part of the film.  Chaplin does most of the obvious clowning around in their onstage routine, but Buster is effortlessly funny in the background.  His job is to haplessly accompany Chaplin on the piano, and he does it hysterically; I could die laughing at the bit where he spins himself off his stool but desperately tries to keep playing.  I also enjoy Buster’s work in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.  It’s another brief role, but he’s a lot of fun as a nearly-blind old Roman looking for his children, kidnapped in infancy by pirates.  (Plus, I get a kick out of the toga-and-slap-shoes combination.)

Bizarrely, the ‘60s saw Buster as something of a staple in teen beach movies (with Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, and the like.)  He appeared in four such movies – Pajama Party, Beach Blanket Bingo, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, and Sergeant Dead Head – doing light gag work and hamming it up as much as you can with a stone face.  These movies are just crazy-weird, much more than I would’ve expected.  There’s teenage love, girls in swimsuits, and cheesy musical numbers, of course, but there are also Martians, girls made by witch doctors, and Freaky Friday-style body swaps.  Buster must have enjoyed them to be in so many, but watching them (and him in them) is a surreal experience.  Another odd appearance of his is In the Good Old Summertime, a musical romantic comedy starring Judy Garland and, from what I can tell, an early version of You’ve Got Mail.  Buster is sweet but wasted in the role of a sycophantic salesman in the music shop where the main characters work; however, his hand is evident in a few comic gags, especially the doomed meet-cute in which Van Johnson destroys Garland’s hat.

Not much to say about Buster’s cameos in Sunset Blvd., Around the World in Eighty Days, or It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, because there’s hardly any “there” there.”  It would’ve been fun to see him playing himself in Hollywood Cavalcade, a story about the early film industry, but it doesn’t get Buster’s silent career at all.  The fake movies it shows him acting in are cheap, silly, and unfunny, it paints him as a simple pie-thrower with no comic finesse, and worst of all, it suggests the clever, coordinated Buster is a bungler with two left feet who only stumbles into comic routines accidentally.  Lastly, I don’t know what Li’l Abner is meant to be.  I think it’s based on a comic strip, but that’s no excuse.  While Buster does what he can in the problematic role of an American Indian hired hand, there’s not much to salvage in that one.