Preface: I’m sure anyone reading this has already
deduced the fact that updates to this blog, if they occur at all, may be
extremely sporadic. However, having said that, I’ve recently had the blogging
bee buzzing round my bonnet again, whispering sweet nothings to me, so it could
go either way.
For a reason that currently escapes me, I’ve recently
gotten into the habit of watching a lot of double features at home. I think part
of it stems from my occasional inability to figure out what I want to watch
next (with there being so much to choose from these days). By having theme
nights or employing some kind of six degrees of separation process for linking
films together (in ways ranging from the obvious to the more outré) I’ve found
this has become less of a problem and has actually made the process of figuring
out what to watch during a given period kind of fun in itself.
Also, being born during the VHS era, I sadly missed
out on the golden age of repertory cinemas/revival houses that used to
programme these things all the time. Certain theatres in the UK’s larger cities still do these sorts of events occasionally but I am unfortunately a fair
distance away from most of them. Needless to say, the obvious solution was to
try to approximate the experience at home. Sure, it isn't nearly the same, but
it does have its positive points (the main one that comes to mind is being able
to have intermissions anytime one feels like it).
Finally, from the critic’s point of view, watching a
few films in succession, whether they are linked in some way, or wildly
divergent, often brings some interesting and occasionally unexpected things to
light.
Most of the double-bills I’ve watched have tended to
be of horror movies but for the first of these little comparative critiques
I’ve picked a couple of comedy-westerns. And as anyone who’s awake will have
already noticed, neither of them is Blazing Saddles, surprisingly.
Aside from their
shared title and setting, the first thing that occurs to me when considering
both of these movies in tandem is that, delightful as they are, neither are
generally considered top drawer stuff from their respective creators. However,
as James Agee pointed out in his review of the Marx Brothers’ later film A Night in Casablanca (Archie Mayo,
1946): “the worst they might ever make would be better worth seeing than most
other things I can think of.” I’d have to say I wholeheartedly agree and that
personally I also find this to be the case with Buster Keaton.
As per usual, we find
Buster, at the beginning of his film, down on his luck and on the move to what
he hopes will be greener pastures. His protagonist, the characteristically
named Friendless, gets off to a shaky start. Firstly, he pawns all of his
possessions and becomes almost instantly broke again after having to buy some
of them back and then, whilst attempting to find work in the city, he’s
trampled under foot by cold, self-absorbed pedestrians. Understandably
depressed about how all this is going, Friendless slumps down and takes a seat
on the side of the train tracks to reassess the situation when he has a vision
of Horace Greeley’s statue (seen at the film’s start) imploring him to “Go
West, young man”. Things have come to a dead end in the city so he decides to
heed the ethereal statue’s advice.
Sadly, the residents
of the ranch that Buster eventually arrives at don’t seem to be much warmer
than their urban counterparts. Sure, they give the little guy a job but they still
act somewhat chilly towards him (the recurring scene where they all seem to
finish dinner the second he sits down at the table springs to mind) and some
are just downright mean to him on occasion (he’s nearly gored by a bull after
being told to wave something red at it by mischievous cowboys).
However, a ray of
sunshine eventually appears on this somewhat cold and desolate horizon in the
form of a cow called Brown Eyes. They become fast friends after Friendless
extracts a rock from her hoof, thus curing a limp and later, somewhat returning
the favour, she saves him from being gored by yet another bull. As one might
imagine though, things eventually conspire to drive Buster and his new bovine
buddy apart.
Whilst the film is
perhaps not as thrilling and certainly less technically audacious than many of
Keaton’s more highly regarded pictures (a few stylistic flourishes aside, such
as a couple of POV shots from the perspective of various charging bulls, which
I imagine would have been pretty damn impressive in 1925), I personally find it
to be the most purely heart-warming of them all (there are still a handful of
his silents that I haven’t seen yet though). On the surface, you might think
that the central premise of what is essentially a love story between a man and
a cow could horribly backfire and thereby relegate the film to the realm of
novel comedic follies but honestly, if you’re not a little bit moved when
Buster attempts to buy Brown Eyes from the rancher (Howard Truesdale) to save
her from the slaughterhouse then I’d suggest there might be something wrong
with your ticker.
The remainder of the
narrative follows Friendless and a train full of cattle bound for the city where they are to be taken to the stockyards and sold in order to save the
ranch from bankruptcy. However, following a shootout with some rival cowboys
Buster has ended up as the sole shepherd of this particular herd and is forced
to guide them single-handedly through the city streets, much to the horror of
the residents and local law enforcement. Understandably intrigued by their new
surroundings, many of the cattle disperse and go for a sojourn round the shops,
forcing Friendless to find some means of rounding them up so they can carry on
towards their intended destination. His solution to this quandary consists of
donning a red devil costume and letting the herd (who are eventually also
joined by the police) chase him, giving us, in the process, one of the most
sublimely absurd sequences in Keaton’s entire canon.
The story comes to a
typically satisfying conclusion as Buster saves the ranch, wins respect from
his peers for his efforts and gets the girl. However, there’s a slight twist in
this particular tale which makes it somewhat unique amongst Keaton’s films and,
like I said earlier, never fails to warm my heart.
Whilst this isn’t
exactly the best film to watch if you’re unfamiliar with silent cinema or have
yet to be introduced to the genius of Buster Keaton, I’d still say you can’t go
far wrong with it either, as long as you take into account when it was made.
Fast forward to 1940
and we find Keaton - whose star had sadly faded somewhat due to the silent era
being superseded by the coming of sound and the creative straightjackets often
imposed upon him by MGM (who he signed to in 1928) - working as an uncredited
gag writer on the Marxs’ namesake picture. For the most part it’s hard to imagine
anything more antithetical to Buster’s relatively slow-burning, predominantly
visual, tragi-comic aesthetic than the anarchic and often surrealistic three-ring
circus sensibility of the Marx Brothers. Unsurprisingly then, it seems that
Keaton’s main contributions to the film were in the form of sight gags for
Harpo, the early sound era’s master of pantomime. Whilst it would be
interesting to speculate upon the specifics of what Keaton contributed to the
picture, the lack of any real documentary evidence upon the matter leaves it
somewhat open as a guessing game for fans and scholars to play.
The plot, as was
pretty much standard for the Marxs’ MGM films, follows the brothers as they
attempt to help a young couple to thwart the unscrupulous machinations of
scheming antagonists. Unfortunately, said couple (again, as is almost
invariably the case in the MGM pictures) may well come across, to a modern
audience at least, as almost overwhelmingly earnest. Having said that, your mileage
may vary and, to be honest, whether I personally find such characters tiresome
or not depends mainly on what sort of mood I’m in at the time. Sometimes it seems
quite sweet and endearing, other times it feels frankly nauseating (although
the same could be said, I suppose, for romance in films generally, both
contemporary and vintage).
So, as you might have
gathered, the story isn’t exactly this film’s main selling point (although I’d
say it’s certainly more engaging in this department than in many of the other post-Thalberg
pictures). Thankfully, all the elements that one generally expects from a good
Marx Brothers movie are still present and in plentiful supply. For the sake of
expediency and ease of reading, here’s a quick list for y’all:
· Wacky
(or in this case suggestively naughty) character names; I’m looking at you S.
Quentin Quayle (apparently San Quentin quail is slang for jailbait).
· Groucho
getting royally fleeced by Chico and Harpo. They manage to con him out of all
his money at the train station, early in the film. Harpo even ends up cutting
his pocket out to help achieve this aim, leading Groucho to announce: “There’s
something corrupt going on around my pants but I just can’t seem to locate it”.
· An
obligatory and wonderfully playful piano number from Chico. It occurred to me when re-watching this film recently that Chico’s right hand is almost like a
character in itself when he’s playing.
· An
obligatory and completely sublime harp interlude from Harpo. Seeing as such
instruments are hard to come by in the Old West, he MacGyvers one out of a
loom.
· Typically
chivalrous banter from Groucho: “Lulubelle, it’s you! I didn’t recognise you
standing up.”
· Borderline
racist stereotyping edging towards the realms of caricature (not completely
uncommon for the period it seems; the infamous (and now censored) black centaur
from Fantasia (also from 1940) and
the “Who Dat Man?” musical number from the Marxs’ A Day at the Races (Sam Wood, 1937) also spring to mind) during the
scene on the Indian reservation which, incidentally, features some of the most
unconvincing Hollywood grown Indians I’ve ever seen (although, yet again, this
kind of thing is not exactly rare in films of this vintage).
As the above suggests, the plot unfolds in and around
the variety show structure that one generally expects from a Marx Brothers’
picture (something that was obviously carried over from their formative days as
vaudeville entertainers). As I suggested earlier, the story in this film feels
(to me at least) somewhat perfunctory and therefore frankly peripheral to the
set pieces, some of which can stand up there with any of the other seminal
scenes from the Marxs’ oeuvre.
The most notable set-piece of the film is undoubtedly
the train chase that comprises the finale. Sure it starts simply and generically,
but as the scene unfolds the Marxs keep amping up their anarchic antics until
the sequence reaches a crazed and almost cartoonish culmination with them
cannibalising the entire train and its carriages for fire-wood and, at
one point, also picking up a house on the train’s cowcatcher, thereby turning
it into a temporary mobile home. The level of visual wit on display during
these scenes has led a few commentators to suggest it was probably here where
Keaton’s influence was at its strongest. Indeed there are elements within this
sequence, albeit combined somewhat differently here, that are vaguely
reminiscent of the end of Buster’s solo debut short One Week (Edward F. Cline & Keaton, 1920), so these claims do make
a certain amount of intuitive sense.
To reiterate then, I wouldn't put either of
these films at the top of the list of movies for people who are new to
pre-WWII film comedy (there are obviously way too many others that better
represent what this era still has to offer for that to seem like a good idea).
Having said that though, I think that thanks to a combination of their lean,
bladder-friendly running times (neither is over 80 minutes long) and their
generosity of spirit, a modern audience, hell, even a young and/or cynical
one, will hopefully still find either
(or maybe even both) of these films fairly entertaining. For those who are
familiar and therefore hopefully already enamored with either Keaton and/or
the Marxs though, I’d say dive right on in; whilst neither of these films can
really be called superlative examples of their respective makers’ arts (as I
mentioned at the beginning of this review) I’d still say they are both highly
competent pieces of work that can stand proudly amongst their more lauded
brethren.
