Some time
back, I did general write-ups on both the film and television work late in
Buster’s career. Now that I’ve gone
through individual reviews of all the major shorts – cover the Arbuckle-Keaton,
independent, Educational, and Columbia eras – I thought I might as well give
these later projects a second look, reviewing them one by one. I can’t promise I’ll get to all the movies
because a) some of them are pretty bad, and b) some of them involve no more
than blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos, but we’ll see what we end up here.
“The
Silent Partner” is a self-contained half-hour story of the “Saturday play”
variety that you saw a fair amount of in the early days of television. Rather than a play, though, it’s a very
Hollywood-specific original story centered around Oscar night. The main locale isn’t the theater but the bar
next door, where the patrons are watching the ceremony on TV. A legendary director receives a huge award,
and in his speech, he looks back over his many years in the business,
particularly at Kelsey Dutton, the long-since-forgotten silent actor who helped
propel him to the acclaim he has today.
Kelsey is, of course, none other than Buster, who quietly watches from
the bar alongside the patrons who don’t realize there’s a faded star in their
midst.
It’s
definitely sentimental, at times overly so, but it’s sweet, too. I like stories about huge successes flashing
back to when they were just starting out and had no idea what they were going
to become. This story plays nicely into
that idea, and it’s also neat to see the famous director giving some (admittedly-overdue)
credit to his former collaborator rather than do the typical “bigshot forgets
all the little people who got him to where he is” thing. And when you bring Buster into the
proceedings, it gets even more bittersweet knowing the real history there. There’s a real warmth to the director’s
tribute to Kelsey, and I like the touch of the bar patrons being kind of
surprised at how much they enjoy the clips of an old silent Kelsey Dutton short
that gets shown on the telecast, a new generation rediscovering Hollywood’s
past gems through television (as happened in real life with Buster.)
But as
I’ve mentioned before, when it comes to the actual “silent movie” clips shown
in the story, much is left to be desired.
The flashback of Kelsey’s break into the business – accidentally barging
into the middle of shooting because he thinks a fake fire is real and
doggedly/haphazardly trying to “rescue” the actress – is amusing, although I
prefer my silent clowns to be inventive comic geniuses rather than clumsy
regular guys who just turn out to be unwitting slapstick savants. At least there are some fun bits; my favorite
is when Buster, in so carefully
setting up a ladder, stops to spit on his hands and it instantly clatters to
the ground. The clip of the fake short
itself, though, feels so much more like an “idea” of a silent comedy rather
than an actual movie. Granted, my silent
movie knowledge isn’t particularly varied, but if Buster is serving as the
inspiration here, the story doesn’t come up with a fake short worthy of his
talents. A lot of the gags are overly
hokey, there are way too many intertitles, and it generally just feels a lot
cheaper and hammier than a true silent classic.
Again, it feels like someone who doesn’t know much about silent comedy
trying to imitate it based on their uninformed, not altogether-complimentary
impressions of it instead of doing an homage that would feel true to slapstick
talent, particularly someone of Buster’s caliber. Certainly a mixed bag here.
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