Jail Bait

This is a rather silly Buster Keaton short and he talks!

Buster plays a rather old office boy for a newspaper. A reporter in order to share the ransom with Buster, asks Buster to confess to a crime of murder and get himself jailed.

The reporter who has a good idea of who the actual murderer is will go and find the culprit. While Buster is in jail, he finds out that the reporter died in a plane crash. Now Buster needs to escape from jail before he gets hanged.

The story is nonsense and unfortunately Buster is portrayed as a simpleton. There is still enough slapstick for Buster to show his comedy skills.

I think this is an excellent Keaton short, equivalent of "The Chemist" and "The Gold Ghost", the other two Educational Keaton films I like the most (I know, I know, everyone thinks "Grand Slam Opera" is the best but me...). What helps enormously is the crisp and clear picture quality afforded us on the KEATON PLUS DVD put out by Kino in 2001. I have read many complaints about this series of Keaton movies being "poverty row" efforts, and that they have a depressed and defeated look to them. Well, if we could get ALL the Educational films restored this way, the comedy could sparkle a bit more and the movies would feel less grungy. This is a great example.

There are a few shining moments in "Jail Bait", in which Buster Keaton treats us to some of his physical magic. Overall, however, "Jail Bait" serves as yet another example of a talkie written, produced, and directed by people who clearly didn't grasp the naiveté and innocence of a genuine Keaton character. They instead produced a mawkish simpleton. He possesses no traits to endear him to us -- no pluck, no wit, no perseverance. His only motive -- love for a girl who clearly doesn't even know he exists -- only underscores the fact that he's clueless, dimwitted, and oblivious. And unlike a real Keaton character, who triumphs due to his own persistence and ingenuity, the hapless hero of "Jail Bait" succeeds only through sheer dumb luck and a touch of deus ex machina.

"Jail Bait" isn't as painful to watch as "Free and Easy", which left me unsure which I wanted to do more, cry or vomit. But it's not a pleasure, either.

*This* is what Buster Keaton should have been doing, in those big-budget years at MGM; not grappling with dames in costly furs and dodgy dialogue. This is what the opening of "Spite Marriage" might have been, if he'd been allowed to make it as a talkie -- this is how the start of "Sidewalks of New York" might have come out, if he'd had any control over the script.

But this isn't a feature film; it's a Poverty Row short, and the date is not 1930 but 1937. We'll never know what Keaton might have produced for MGM if he had only been consulted in the matter, and hyperbole is out of place when dealing with the output of the all-too-grandly-named Educational Film Corporation of America. It remains nevertheless the case that this is a thoroughly attractive little comedy, the equal of many of his silent shorts of the 1920s -- minus the intertitles, plus sound.

The storyline is plausible, ingenious, satisfying and yet bizarre. The set-piece jokes are good ones, often classics to rival any of his earlier work, as in the sequence when he does his best to get arrested, or the scene where he enters the cell as possibly the least escape-prone prisoner in history! His physical gifts are displayed to good advantage, with the pratfalls of the MGM years all but forgotten in favour of gags that actually advance the plot -- "Jail Bait" is no masterpiece, deprived of any chance at beauty by its inescapable financial constraints, but it shares almost all the ingredients of Keaton's best work. And quite simply, it's very funny; the old magic strikes again.

More than that -- by and large it's "right", in a way that Keaton films had once always been right: everything fits. It's clever, it's good, and it's authentic Buster, as effective as ever... what more can one ask?

Boy, it was odd to actually hear Buster Keaton's voice. After watching almost all of his silent films, it was kind of shock for me to hear him utter his first words ("What happened?") His voice is a little shaky but that fits him. Keaton is famous for his silent films but he did make a few good short "talkies" and this is one of them.

You can still see him doing what he does best: pratfalls and other slapstick routines. As everyone knows, he was a master at that and his physical prowess was unmatched. Speaking of physicality, he plays a "fall guy" for his reporter-friend, who wants to capture a criminal. Nobody in their right mind would go to jail, with a good possibility of being hanged, just to help his pal out and get $98 so he can buy a diamond ring for his girl......except Buster!

Overall, there are enough jokes in this dated little short to make most Keaton fans happy and amuse others, too.

The chief of police is played by Bud Jamison, a frequent foil of The Three Stooges around this period." Actually, that's apt because this short had a definite Three Stooges atmosphere to it.