Parlor, Bedroom and Bath

"Parlor, Bedroom, & Bath" combines Buster Keaton's comic skills with a decent supporting cast and a light-hearted story about tangled romances. The first half is mostly bland, but things pick up later in the movie.

Jeff wants to marry his sweetheart Virginia, but Virginia refuses to get married until her fussy, spinsterish older sister Angie gets married first. When Jeff runs into (literally) mild-mannered nonentity Reggie Irving (Keaton), he decides to pass off Irving as a notorious playboy, to arouse Angie's interest. The plot also involves some other characters and their own romantic difficulties, and the build-up goes on for too long. It is all rather slow-going for much of the film, with the only laughs coming when Keaton gets an occasional chance to display his non-verbal comic ability. The part worth waiting for comes in the second half, when all of the characters converge on a hotel, in a lengthy and pretty good comic sequence.

Overall, it's not much when compared with Keaton's silent films. But if you watch, make sure to stick around for the last half of the film, when things get a lot funnier.

Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton were the top comedy actors of early filmdom, each with his own characteristic persona. And, among all of the early and later comedians, none played a better dumb straight face role than Keaton. Not until Peter Sellers came along was there another actor who could so well mix straight face with buffoonery, slapstick, screwball antics and clever - but ever so short, lines.

Keaton proved to be as good in the talkies as he had been in the silent movies. But for the stripping of his creative freedoms in new contracts after the advent of sound, he might have given us many more years of great comedic roles. Thankfully, recent generations are coming to see the genius and talent of this great entertainer.

It is tempting, as some reviewers have alluded, to judge Keaton mostly on his slapstick scenarios, which were often so prominent in his best silent films. But, Keaton was so much more than falling down comedy. And he continued to show his broader genius into his first talkies, as this film shows - even as the studios kept imposing more and more strictures that would eventually relegate him to small and then bit parts. When given good scripts and a fine supporting cast with good roles, Keaton and company could make smashing comedies. This is one such film, with Reginald Denny, Charlotte Greenwood and some others helping build the comedy.

In Parlor, Bedroom & Bath, we see Keaton at his deadpan best. Just listen, look and laugh. How anyone can watch this film and not howl during a good half dozen segments is beyond me. The film itself is wacko from the start. So, put the best wacko actor of the time in it and all you have is a great laugh vehicle to enjoy time and again.

PB & B pokes fun at a lot of aspects and stations of life. The rich and trivial, success and workaholics, glamor and the plain, marriage and love, fidelity and infidelity - all get a little treatment with humor and slapstick. It's too bad for those few folks who may have watched this film and just don't know how to laugh. Sometimes, we have to look for the genius and great in the simple. And there's plenty of that in this film. I wish all who watch it anew the same or more laughter from the head and the heart that I have had.

Here are some favorite lines from this film. This IMDb page for the move has many more under the Quotes section.

Jeffrey Haywood, "I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll marry Angelica myself." Virginia Embrey, "What?" Jeffrey, "Yeah, and then I'll poison her and marry you." Virginia, "Where are you going? Jeffrey, "Where am I going? To get the poison."

Jeffrey Haywood, to Reginald Irving, "I might fix it so she could be the mother of your children." At that, Reginald faints.

Jeffrey Haywood, "Listen, Polly, we've always been good friends, haven't we?" Polly Hathaway, "Yes. But you're scaring the friendship out of me."

Reginald Irving, offering to pay the farmer for their ride to the hotel on his hay wagon after their car lost a wheel, "How much do I owe you?" Hay wagon driver, "Ya think two dollars would be too much?" Reginald, "Yes." Wagon driver, "Well, then give me a dollar."

Polly Hathaway, "You have all the passion of an infuriated clam."

If you ignore that this film is part of the downhill slide Buster Keaton's professional life is experiencing at the hands of MGM, this is a rather enjoyable example of a pre-code farce, particularly the last half of the film that is set at the hotel. The first half is rather slow and clumsy, and has a rather unbelievable premise - a wealthy young woman, Angelica, is only attracted to womanizing cads, and furthermore only wants to marry such a man. Normally, this would just be her problem, but her younger sister wants to marry, and due to custom cannot until the older sister does so. The younger sister's fiancée enlists Buster's character, Reggy, to play the part of international playboy and hopefully future husband for Angelica since Reggy is quite attracted to the older sister, but is completely inexperienced with women.

The second half of the film is the amusing part. It's set at a hotel where Buster is supposed to have a prearranged rendezvous with a woman and be discovered by Angelica, thus sealing his reputation as a cad and stealing her heart. Unfortunately, Buster takes the wrong woman to the hotel - and she's a woman who happens to have an insanely jealous husband. The woman Buster is supposed to meet, Charlotte Greenwood, is the funniest part of this film. She literally steals the "training session" scene she has with Buster. Cliff Edwards has some funny lines too as the hotel bell boy who keeps walking in on Keaton who is always in the embrace of a different woman each time.

It's just so sad to see MGM casting Buster once again as a clueless bumbling fool and doing their best to make it look ridiculous that Buster could ever be considered a ladie's man. Keaton does the best he can with the material he is given, but it makes you wonder what could have been if anyone had listened to his ideas about making comedies in the sound era.

As for film quality, I have never seen a copy of this film that was not unacceptably fuzzy. The only one I'd recommend is the copy that comes with "Industrial Strength Keaton". That copy has been restored and it shows. Plus it has a commentary track and there is a featurette included about Keaton's mansion, the Italian villa, which is the setting for the first half of this film.

When I watched "Matinee at the Bijou" on Saturday afternoons on PBS during the early '80s, this was one of the movies featured there. It was also my first exposure to Buster Keaton having previously read about him in an encyclopedia of movie comics called "The Funsters". The most funny parts I remember from that first viewing was when he kept trying to do his "I Love You" routine while extending his arms to various women in a mechanical way. Now that I've watched this again on the "Industrial Strength Keaton" DVD collection, I found it even more funnier having just seen many of his silent shorts with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and his later TV appearances and industrial films. Okay, so maybe some of the dialogue was a bit contrived and some scenes were a bit frantic but still I managed to laugh during the whole thing especially during the free-for-all-finale. Also, Cliff Edwards as the bell boy and Charlotte Greenwood as the woman Buster was supposed to meet at the hotel deserve special mention for their chemistry with The Great Stone Face. Oh, and the reactions of Joan Peers as Nita, who's trying to get her husband jealous, as she reacts to Buster's accidental "moves" were also funny to me. Really, I was just doubled over with laughter at this one especially during some visual stuff like that car-train sequence or the wet-floor-everyone-slips-on scene. So on that note, if you're a Keaton fan curious about these early talkies with him, I highly recommend Parlor, Bedroom and Bath. P.S. Ms. Peers was another performer who's from my birthtown of Chicago, Ill.

I have to agree with other commenters that this was a poor choice of films for Buster Keaton. The early part of the film is disappointing, as it provides Keaton with no opportunities to do the amazing physical stunts he's rightly famous for. I found it dismaying to see Keaton, who flipped over the rigging in "The Love Nest" and made the clotheslines his playground in "Neighbors" deflated by a half-slack garden hose.

But the hotel sequence, in which an amazonian blonde tries to teach Keaton's pathologically girl-shy character to be a real Casanova, turns things around. "Buster Keaton" and "screen kiss" are two ideas that don't seem to go that well together, but Keaton turns the combination into something that's purely his. Like the climax of "Steamboat Bill Jr.", Keaton's character finally seizes control of a situation where he's previously been a victim of circumstance. Suddenly he figures out how this works and charges ahead in his own unorthodox, exuberantly acrobatic way. And that moment is worth waiting for.