The
Educational shorts end with a bit more of a whimper than a bang. Love
Nest on Wheels isn’t bad, but it’s nothing special. It’s most notable for copious Keaton family
involvement and a number of gags cribbed from the Arbuckle-Keaton short The Bell Boy.
Buster
and his hillbilly family run the crumbling Van Buren hotel. They haven’t had a paying guest in ages and
are on the verge of foreclosure when a pair of newlyweds come by. The decrepit hotel doesn’t impress them much,
but Buster has a better idea – the family is in possession of a reasonably-nice
trailer, and if he can convince the newlyweds to buy it, they’ll have enough
money to cover their rent. The only
problem? The small matter of the live
cow inside it.
Lots of gags from The Bell Boy here, the most prominent ones being the mule-drawn
elevator (and hijinks therein) and the little overhead track for the basket
carrying hot towels between the kitchen and the in-hotel barber shop (and the
incidental trouble Buster gets into over it.)
While the story here is a lot more straightforward than The Bell Boy, which is tons of fun but
really meandering, pretty much all of these gags are funnier in the
original. As always, there’s something
to be said for the atmosphere of silent slapstick over sound slapstick, and I
think the country-bumpkin shtick going on here also makes the comedy a little
slower, which messes with the pacing of the gags.
However,
I do appreciate that there’s quite a bit of slapstick here, even if a fair
amount of it is stuff we saw to better effect in The Bell Boy. For gags that
are novel to this short, I could watch Buster failing to pull a cow out of a
trailer all day, and Buster’s sister Louise has an awesome tumble out of a
barber’s chair. Additionally, the worry
over the trailer builds to a really well-timed climactic sight gag.
Like Palooka from Paducah, this is another
Keaton family short, and, also like the aforementioned short, it gets by in
large part because of that fact. No Joe
this time around, but mother Myra, sister Louise, and brother Harry all appear
in the short as members of Buster’s onscreen family (I believe this is the only
time that Harry played more than an extra in any of Buster’s films, so that’s
kind of neat to see.) But the nostalgia
casting doesn’t end with the Keatons. In
keeping with the Fatty Arbuckle-themed short, Arbuckle regular Al St. John
plays Buster’s uncle, the guy responsible for letting the cow get into the
trailer in the first place. I have to
admit, this casting sort of fascinates me.
Even knowing that it’s him, I
can scarcely recognize him at all. He looks
so different than the gangly figure he cut in the Fatty Arbuckle days (I mean,
I get it – those films were made 20 years before this one, but I haven’t seen
anything he made in the intervening years to fill in that long gap between what
he looked like in the ‘10s compared to the ‘30s.) He acts different, too; he doesn’t pull the
same goofy faces as he did in those silent shorts. Not to mention, this is also the only time
I’ve heard his voice, which is always an interesting experience when it comes
to silent film actors.
Warnings
Slapstick
violence.
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