My Wife's Relations

A broken glass, a vigilent lady, a Polish judge of peace , the marriage and a too large family, promissing letter and ...the truth. One of nice short films, not memorable but nice. Few seductive gags. And a powerful moral. So, just Buster Keaton and his universe.

While routine in parts, this short comedy has some good moments. The story has Buster trying to deal with a crew of nightmarish in-laws, and the general understanding is that the material hit pretty close to home for him when he made this. When film-makers put too much of their own lives into their movies, it doesn't always lead to the best on-screen product, and some of the material here seems more labored than usual. The setup is quite creative, but some of the punch lines don't really come off. Still, it has some funny moments, and most Keaton fans will want to take a look.

Buster winds up married to a harridan and finds himself sharing a house with her, her surly father and four brutish brothers. They treat him abominably until they begin to think he might be well-off ... Made a year after Buster had got married and was single-handedly supporting his wife's large family, this is one of his more auto-biographical shorts, and feels rather bitter. Some very funny scenes, but not one of the genius' best.

Not one of Keaton's better efforts, but there are a few laughs to be found in this wry tale of a man who finds himself accidentally married to a battle-axe (Kate Price) with four hulking brothers, none of whom take kindly to his presence in their home.

Buster Keaton was often one to draw creative inspiration from his personal life. Frequently his love life, which was stormy and dramatic. Here's one such example: he married his first wife in 1921, and within a year he produced this short film, about a well-meaning sucker who's torn from his happy livelihood by a sudden marriage and an abhorrent set of greedy, oafish in-laws. The fictional version involves four large, bumbling brothers, as contrasted by his real bride's two sisters (all successful actresses), but it doesn't take much effort to read between the lines.

In this case, unfortunately, the personal connection doesn't result in many laughs. Buster is unjustly abused and exploited, despite his best efforts to make nice and blend in. Even when those good intentions don't backfire, his craftiness occasionally trumping his overwhelming bad luck, he's barely given a pat on the head before catching the persona non grata tag again and the whole dance begins anew.

It all culminates in a desperate chase, as many of Keaton's capers seem to, this one through a posh mansion and across the crowded roadways just outside. That's the sizzle of the film, another example of the expressive star's knack for repurposing everyday objects in acrobatic new ways, but it's brief and inconclusive. Satisfying climaxes sometimes seem optional in these brief comedies, but this one ends far more abruptly than most. Almost as if its star hadn't yet found an answer to his own similar, private entanglement.