I’ll
level with you. There’s some good stuff
in Buster Keaton’s Columbia shorts – Mooching
through Georgia is lots of fun, and I’ll never not love it when Buster
pulls himself up one leg at a time and momentarily “sits” in midair, like he
does in The Taming of the Snood – but
there are some very unfortunate clunkers as well. By and large, the remaining shorts represent
the latter.
Nothing
but Pleasure (1940)
Buster
and his wife go on a cross-country road trip to swap their old car for a newer
model; the venture is, naturally, fraught with mishaps. This one’s not bad, mostly just a little
boring. There’s a new edition of the
“drunk wife” scene from Spite Marriage,
and I like the extended sequence of Buster trying to get out between two parked
cars.
The
Spook Speaks (1940)
Buster
and his gal pal are hired to housesit for a magician – not to watch over his
house, but the tricks inside it (he’s convinced that someone’s trying to steal
them.) It’s a nice enough “spooky romp,”
but much of the humor is very generic.
Tons of trapdoor gags, which are pretty fun, and all manner of double
takes and scared reaction shots.
His Ex
Marks the Spot (1940)
To
avoid being bankrupted by alimony, Buster invites his ex-wife to live with him
and his new wife; the ex’s good-for-nothing boyfriend tags along, and the whole
thing goes about as well as you’d expect.
Definitely not a fan of this one – it dips too far into the trap of
making Buster out to be a chump, and the non-Buster characters are all varying
degrees of obnoxious.
General
Nuisance (1941)
Buster
joins the army to be near the nurse he loves, and to get even nearer, tries to
get himself injured on the base. I get a
kick of the extended version of the “Buster refuses to disrobe for his
physical” scene from Doughboys, and
there’s a dance in the second half that, while apropos of nothing, is nicely
amusing. Pretty meandering, though.
She’s
Oil Mine (1941)
If General Nuisance is reminiscent of Doughboys, She’s Oil Mine is essentially a remake of the first two reels of The Passionate Plumber. Seriously, exact same plot – Buster is a
plumber, and his client’s hotheaded
boyfriend mistakes him for her new lover – and many of the same gags. Some nice work by Buster, especially in the
duel scene at the end.
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