Because of this, the most surprising thing about these 10 shorts is to see Buster Keaton films with the slapping, honking and other gag-tweaking sound effects you also find in Three Stooges shorts (the Stooges made all their shorts at Columbia). This just seems wrong. Then again, much that goes on in these shorts feels wrong.
But more about that in a bit. Like Keaton's mid-1930s shorts for Educational (of which I've never seen any), Keaton's Columbia shorts have a bad reputation. To Sony Pictures Home Entertainment's credit, Buster Keaton Collection doesn't try to pass these shorts off as Keaton's best work. The first thing I watched was the DVD's 25-minute documentary, From Silents to Shorts, and the many film historians interviewed in it don't whitewash the fact that the circumstances behind these shorts were a lot different than those behind Keaton's 1920s films, his heyday. The Columbia shorts came after Keaton's precipitous fall: the loss of creative control of his movies when he signed with MGM in 1928, his less satisfying talkies for that studio, the break-up of his marriage and a drinking problem that caused MGM to fire him. During the mid-1930s, Keaton barely hung on to his career, making features in Europe, working as a gag writer and doing those shorts for lowly Educational. So the steadiness of a shorts series at a major studio brought Keaton welcome stability, but not necessarily a change to innovate.
After all he'd been through in the 1930s, it's unclear if Keaton even had the creative inspiration left to progress as a movie comic as he had in the 1920s. If he did, it's not in much evidence in the Columbia shorts, but it's not as if Keaton had creative control over them. What Keaton did still definitely have were an arsenal of gags and a body that could take wild bumps.
Although Keaton made only 10 shorts for Columbia, released over a period of 20 months, the studio never really came up with an overall concept for how to handle him. In some shorts, he plays guys named Buster; in some, his characters have different names. In some, he's a workingman; in others, he's a millionaire. Almost all of them recycle a premise, a set piece or a specific gag from an earlier Keaton movie.
That's not always a bad thing. The Pest from the West, Keaton's first Columbia short, is a remake of his weak 1936 feature An Old Spanish Custom (recently made available on the Industrial Strength Keaton DVD). But it's an improvement, if only because it's 45 minutes shorter. As in the feature, the highlight is the scene in which a ukulele-playing Keaton serenades a woman, getting konked on the head with fruit by a non-admiring neighbor in rhythm to his song. Other shorts here, including She's Oil Mine and the painful The Spook Speaks, also remake earlier movies.
My favorite of the bunch is Nothing But Pleasure, which casts Buster as an everyman, not as a fop or a bumbler, the two extremes that just don't work for him here (imagine casting the unconventional, infinitely resourceful guy from The General as a bumbler!). With Dorothy Appleby, a semi-regular in the series, cast as his wife (a situation that should have been worth repeating), the two travel to Detroit because Buster wants to buy a new car there and drive it back home. It's something the real Keaton often did in reality, but in Nothing But Pleasure nothing goes right during the trip and Keaton takes many funny tumbles during the story.
Unlike the consistent Nothing But Pleasure, most of the shorts are good in spots, but have sour elements, too. Pardon My Berth Marks is a typical example. With aspiring reporter Buster following a socialite's wife (Appleby) on a train, it has some amusing schtick. But having Buster's character be a 45-year-old office boy is just pathetic, as is trying to present a character that age as being sexually innocent, a premise in some of the train gags. There's a similar push and pull in the presence of Elsie Ames, who's in about half the shorts. She's a loudmouth and an obnoxious actress in verbal scenes, but she's also a very good physical comedian who could shove Buster around (and get shoved back) as few comediennes could. Keaton and Ames have elaborate physical scenes in Nothing But Pleasure and The Taming of the Snood that are among the best moments of these shorts.
So Keaton's Columbia shorts, while certainly not among Keaton's best movies, aren't total washouts. If you've already seen his 1920s movies, you'll want to check these out. If you haven't, don't worry about these. In addition to the From Silents to Shorts featurette, Sony also gains points for including informative, though sometimes overenthusiastic, audio commentaries (by the various historians in the featurette) and for the set's attractive packaging. There's also a paperbound reproduction of Keaton's copy of the script of She's Oil Mine, which is not as interesting as it sounds. That short is pretty tiresome, Keaton's handwritten notations are mainly changes in dialogue (this was the pre-photocopying age, after all) and there's an embarrassing note at the start of the booklet by Keaton's granddaughter, Melissa Talmadge Cox, in which she somehow calls his Columbia shorts"some of the first talkies of the 1930s." Yikes. For one thing, they were made in 1939 and 1940; for another, any talkie from the 1930s is hardly among the first.
For more information about The Buster Keaton Collection, visit Sony Pictures.
by Paul Sherman
