With this all-star Cinerama epic, producer/director Stanley Kramer vowed to make "the comedy that would end all comedies." The story begins during a massive traffic jam, caused by reckless driver Smiler Grogan (Jimmy Durante), who, before (literally) kicking the bucket, cryptically tells the assembled drivers that he's buried a fortune in stolen ...
In the Good Old Summertime is a musical remake of the 1940 Ernst Lubitsch comedy The Shop Around the Corner, which in turn was based on a play by Miklos Laszlo. The locale has been changed from Hungary to Chicago, but the turn-of-century time frame and the plot remain the same. Van Johnson and Judy Garland play a couple of clerks in a sheet-music ...
Director Richard Lester uses the Burt Shevelove/Larry Gelbart/Stephen Sondheim Broadway musical hit as a launching pad for some of his wildest slapstick gaggery. Zero Mostel repeats his stage role as Pseudolus, the cunning Roman slave who'll do anything to win his freedom. The plot hinges on three Roman houses next door to each another. One is the ...
Buster Keaton's third starring feature (discounting 1920's The Saphead, which was not conceived with Keaton in mind), Our Hospitality is a boisterous satire of family feuds and Southern codes of honor. In 1831, Keaton leaves his home in New York to take charge of his family mansion down South. En route, Keaton befriends pretty Natalie Talmadge ...
At the request of his star Buster Keaton, producer Joseph M. Schenck purchased an obsolete ocean liner for $20,000. Keaton wanted to use the boat as a "prop" in his upcoming feature comedy, but went into production with nary a plot idea in his head. Eventually, Buster and his chief gagman Clyde Bruckman came up with a story involving two wealthy, ...
Based on the stage comedy by Charles W. Bell and Mark Swan (previously filmed in 1920), Parlor, Bedroom and Bath is a curious mixture of all that was good and everything that was bad in Buster Keaton's talkie features. Keaton plays Reginald Irving, a dimwitted bill-poster who finds himself the pawn in a scheme cooked up by wealthy Jeffrey Haywood ...
Buster Keaton plays Johnny Gray, a Southern railroad engineer who loves his train engine, The General, almost as much as he loves Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack). When the opening shots of the Civil War are fired at Fort Sumter, Johnny tries to enlist -- and he is deemed too useful as an engineer to be a soldier. All Johnny knows is that he's been ...
Out of the beaches and into the boudoirs go Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello and the rest of the gang in Pajama Party. Actually, the whole megillah is as innocent as a newborn babe, but there's plenty of smirking and snickering during a wild 'n' wacky girl's slumber party. Frankie Avalon has only a cameo, relinquishing center stage to Tommy Kirk, ...
Battling Butler has to be the strangest of Buster Keaton's silent features. Based on the musical comedy of the same name, the film casts Keaton as wimpy millionaire Alfred Butler, who goes on a vacation in the mountains in the company of his faithful valet (Snitz Edwards). While communing with nature, Alfred falls in love with a beautiful young ...
Like Prohibition, Franklin-Blank Productions' The Villain Still Pursued Her is best regarded as a "noble experiment". Using the hoary old stage melodrama The Drunkard: or, the Fallen Saved as its inspiration, the film is a contemptous send-up of all such Victorian mellers, its "serious" moments deliberately and broadly played for laughs. The tone ...
Thirty years after its release, Buster Keaton admitted that his first feature film was essentially three two-reel comedies strung together. Perhaps this was a way for the comic filmmaker to play it safe; he had achieved success for his short films and if Three Ages wasn't going very well, its trio of storylines could have been chopped up into ...
How to Stuff a Wild Bikini is considered to be the strangest of the "Beach Party" movies. Frankie (Frankie Avalon) is off in the navy, serving in the South Pacific, and nervous about all of the guys that will be hitting on Dee Dee (Annette Funicello) back at the beach. He makes a deal with an eccentric white witch doctor (Buster Keaton), who ...
The Saphead was based on the tried-and-true Winchell Smith stage comedy The New Henrietta, previously filmed in 1915 as The Lamb. Buster Keaton, at the time a popular 2-reel comedy attraction, makes his feature-film debut in the role of the addlepated son of Wall Street lion William H. Crane. In an effort to make something worthwhile of his ...
Buster Keaton once described his 1931 vehicle Sidewalks of New York as "God-awful"; it's hardly that bad, though admittedly it pales in comparison with his silent classics. Keaton plays Harmon, a wealthy young Park Avenue socialite who falls in love with Lower East Side denizen Margie (Anita Page). For her sake, he tries to reform a tough gang of ...
Buster Keaton plays a young lawyer who will inherit $7 million at 7 o'clock on his 27th birthday--provided he is married. Long before discovering this, Keaton has pursued a lifelong courtship of Ruth Dwyer, whose refusals have become ritualistic over the years (the passage of time is amusingly conveyed by showing a puppy grow to adulthood). He ...
Buster Keaton's second starring talkie finds him cast as wealthy, pampered Elmer, who heads down to the local employment office to hire a new chauffeur. Elmer isn't aware that the office has been converted into a World War I recruiting center, and before he knows it, he's in an ill-fitting uniform, enduring the verbal cannonades of sergeant Ed ...
In his last silent film, Buster Keaton plays a pants-presser who pines for aloof stage actress Dorothy Sebastian. When she is jilted by her fiance Edward Earle, Sebastian spitefully marries Keaton. He is ecstatic (or as ecstatic as the poker-faced comedian ever gets) until he finds out why Sebastian has said "I do." Disconsolately, Keaton takes a ...
In this comedy, Jimmy Potts (Jimmy Durante) and Elmer J. Butts (Buster Keaton, Jr.) come up with a scheme to start up a beer brewery with the hope that Prohibition will soon be over. However, things don't work out exactly as they planned, and they end up in a mess of trouble. ~ Iotis Erlewine, All Movie Guide
London, 1914. Calvero (Charles Chaplin), a once-great music hall comedian, weaves drunkenly home to his shabby flat. As he arrives home, he is suddenly sobered by a bad smell. It isn't his shoes, as he originally assumes, but the smell of gas, emanating from behind a locked door. Calvero smashes his way in, finding the unconscious Terry (Claire ...
With this delightful film, Buster Keaton rivals Charlie Chaplin for comic poetry and pathos. Keaton's character, known only as Friendless, is a Midwestern boy who is down on his luck. After an abortive attempt to get by in the city, he follows Horace Greeley's advice to "Go West, young man!" As a result, Friendless winds up on a cattle ranch and ...
The silent comedy feature College stars Buster Keaton as a scholarly young man who doesn't know beans about sports. When he arrives in college, Buster finds that all the Big Men on Campus are jocks. To impress pretty coed Anne Cornwall, Buster tries and fails to join all the school teams. Even when he attempts to take a job at the campus soda ...
Buster Keaton's best sound feature casts the Great Stone Face as Professor Post, a naïve college pedant who mistakenly believes he has inherited $750,000. Hoping to use this windfall to bring the Fine Arts to the waiting world, Post gets mixed up with a two-bit theatrical troupe, headed by Jimmy the piano player (Jimmy Durante). Enchanted by the ...
Not the best of Buster Keaton's silents, Steamboat Bill, Jr. nonetheless contains some of Keaton's best and most spectacular sight gags. Keaton plays Willie Canfield, the namby-pamby son of rough-and-tumble steamboat captain "Steamboat Bill" Canfield (Ernest Torrence). When he's not trying to make a man out of his boy, the captain is carrying on a ...
He began life as the child of a physically abusive and alcoholic vaudeville entertainer father, but somehow survived this tumult and spun himself into one of the most popular movie comedians outside of Charlie Chaplin. For a time, the "Great Stone Face," as Buster Keaton came to be known, held court among Hollywood's elite, and it seemed that his ...
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