Pre-Code Comedy Starring Buster Keaton

      At work during a dull two hour period, no customers, I searched the phone for a movie to watch.  Ten minutes later I selected Speak Easily (1932), director Edward Sedgwick's fifty-fourth of his seventy-eight feature films.  Sedgwick worked with Laurel and Hardy, directed Buster Keaton in The Cameraman, his last film a big screen I Love Lucy (1953) I had never heard of prior to ten minutes ago.

     Directors in Sedgwick's era worked all the time, working with movie to movie, under contract, making livings, buying houses, marrying, having children and pets, their jobs backed by a strong union.  Directing seventy-eight feature films by the age of sixty--how old he was when he died--is quite the cinematic achievement, so I respect the work of those days when directors each made shitloads of movies.  As Rhombus, YouTube Channel John Berner (Blue circle with a J in it for the thumbnail), I've made eighty-one movies since 2000.  Thirty-one of them can currently be seen on the above-mentioned channel.  Forgive me for not putting in a link.  I am so fucking stupid about the use of computers I don't know how to do it.

     Speak Easily has as a protagonist a head-in-the-clouds professor, Timoleon Post (Buster Keaton, still doing his own stunts and still very funny, though the artistic quality of his sound films lies well below silent masterpieces like One Week and The Generaal), a man stumbling from one circumstance to another, out of touch with normal life, slang, and the tough social intercourse of early 1930s America.  He receives a telegram informing him he's inherited $750,000 from a dead uncle.  Immediately, he's packed and off to the train station.  He ends up on the wrong train, suitcase left behind.

     A traveling troupe of musical and dance performers, most of them women, led by James (Jimmy Durante), bring into their bosom the clueless Professor Post.  He eventually lets it be known he has 750,000 dollars, he's on his way to New York, and why not bring the troupe with him?  They can put on a show there, making up for the one cancelled en route to Cleveland.

     Durante and Keaton make an odd pair, as if they were thrown together as a comedy team at the end of a five hour brainstorming session in Louis B. Mayer's office.  Nevertheless, the two men are each in their own selves talented comic performers.  They made three films together at MGM in 1932 and 1933.  Keaton's silent film years of the 1910s and 1920s show him at his best, though.  His blank face, deep donkey-like eyes and distinctive hat, as well as his tremendous ability at doing stunts, worked well with no sound.  Looking at him in those films, it doesn't matter what he says.  He's a close-mouthed presence, but Durante requires sound to be effective.  His distinctive scratchy rhythmic voice and genial personality, the famous big nose, his piano-accompanied storytelling (which is fucking awesome), makes me crack up every time I see him do his shtick.  

     The troupe commences rehearsals in a rented theater.  Professor Post has his own office, he's hiring some new cast members when in walks Eleanor Espere (Thelma Todd, a statuesque blonde of especial magnificence--surely one of the most beautiful women to ever act on screen).  After her hiring, she strips off her dress to show James and the professor what else she's got going on.  Eleanor in black underwear outlining her curves smiles at them, the scene ends and we can only wonder what happens next.

     She makes moves on the professor.  They get drunk in her apartment, a year before Prohibition would end.  The next morning, neither remembers what happened, but she assumes something intimate did happen because he's still there in the next bed.

     I've seen this sense of wonderment about possible drunken sex in movie and TV characters before.  Alcohol blitzes a character, character wakes up, doesn't remember anything but it's possible sex happened.

     Why the fuck don't these characters take a look at the condition of their genitals?  Moreover, how do their genitals feel?  A vigorous fuck session can be felt in the body for a while after it happens.

     So, as you can guess, there's no scene with Thelma Todd inspecting her crotch, but she's quite attached to the idea of becoming Mrs. Post, wife of someone with, in today's money, 14.2 million dollars.

     About this fortune: it doesn't exist.  Professor Post's manservant, feeling for his gloomy and depressed boss, made up the telegram's content, wanting just to cheer him up.  This has the effect, ultimately, of screwing everyone, including the professor, connected to a musical backed by imaginary money.

     By the climax, James and the professor spend much of their time dodging a process server dispatched by the theater's owner to collect overdue rent.  The server ends up watching the premiere performance of the musical that wasn't good enough for Cleveland.  The performance itself, a disaster interrupted by Professor Post' fleeing from the process server, couldn't be farther away from the glossy professionalism of a Busby Berkeley set piece.  Women, tightly costumed, stand on top of cylinders like pillars supporting a temple's roof.  One of them falls to the stage during Post's running around.  The audience, believing the chaos is part of the show, laughs heartily, the show's a hit.  Post ends up with the actress he wants to be with, Pansy Peets (Ruth Selwyn), while Eleanor Espere ends up pissed off at a guy who pretended to have the money she needs a potential mate to have.

     It's a moderately good movie, a two and a half star out of five kind of film.  Keaton and Durante are good, as is Thelma Todd.  The situation with the misleading telegram seems out of place.  Who would do something like that?  Like holding out a sardine to a hungry seal and then withdrawing it, the tactic of helping his employer find a little relief from his worries, creates for that employer an immediate and joyful hope but, inevitably, that positive development shifts suddenly underneath the fortunes of the very man the servant seeks to please.  It seems a cruel joke on the professor, yet, the servant sent the misleading telegram in all earnestness, seeking to do good, so I guess he's someone who lacks the ability to think things through.

     Really, the telegram is just a way to get the movie going, setting up a situation enabling Post to meet James and the rest.  

Vic Neptune