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Three on a Limb (1936)

** (out of 4)

A Scout leader (Buster Keaton) pulls into a drive-in where he quickly falls for the waitress (Lona Andre) who he agrees to drive home. Once there Keaton learns that the girl's parents want her to marry two different men so Buster gets the idea of trying to win her heart but when he goes to marry her the other two men show up and problems follow. This Educational film is yet another in a long-series where one can't help but feel sorry for Keaton. While this film isn't a complete failure and it's true there are a couple nice laughs, at the same time you can't help but wish the material had been much better. There's very little plot going on here outside Keaton wanting to marry the girl but her mom and dad both wanting someone else. This leads to a frantic scene at the end when all three men, the girl, the parents and a second woman are fighting and trying to get married but different sets end up in front of the preacher. This is a pretty amusing sequence because director Lamont keeps things moving at a fast pace and the actors are actually doing a fairly good job with it. The problem is that the majority of what leads up to it is rather lame. There are a couple jokes about Keaton being dressed up as a Scout but we're never really given any idea why he is. It doesn't add too much to the plot either. The Andre character is very adorable and the actress does a nice job with the role making you see why all three would be fighting over her. Keaton isn't too bad either as he takes several falls along the way. Harold Goodwin and Grant Withers are good as the other men.

"Three on a Limb" is from Educational Pictures--a company that specialized in low-budget comedy shorts, not educational movies. After Buster Keaton left his disastrous fun at MGM (the studio simply had no idea how to use him), he moved on to Educational. While his films were still a far cry from his great films of the 1920s, they were pleasant little comedies--provided you kept your expectations a bit lower. Oddly, though, in many of them they cast Keaton as a guy who becomes infatuated with a younger lady--as is the case with this one as well.

Buster is a Scout leader who meets a waitress at a drive-in restaurant (Lona Andre) and becomes infatuated with her. However, she tells him that two men already are planning on marrying her...so his chances seem pretty dim. Yet despite this, she brings him home to meet her family--and they are not impressed to say the least. When the wedding does arrive, the two men show up--as does Buster. And what happens next is mostly a lot of pushing and shoving--like you'd see in a Three Stooges film. This style was completely wrong for Keaton...plus it was a shabby way to end the film. As a result, it's one of the poorest outings during his stay with Educational.

I always wondered what would have happened if in the 1930s, someone had given Keaton a 16mm camera with plenty of film and told him to use his imagination and make movies with no particular budget. Turns out, he practically did just this by making films for the "Educational" movie company. Most of these little films are quite enjoyable; they just don't have the budget for any beauty, special Keaton effects, or no-holds-barred creativity. "Three on a Limb" is a good example. The action is a little subdued for a while, but when the pace quickens, it is really very, very funny. And Keaton leaps and falls and climbs and gets cast around like he was a teenager. The only disappointment is that often these movies seem to run out of film before he was able to improvise around enough to find the right final joke to a sequence, and in this case the dénouement appears without giving us the climax, so the expected Big Laugh doesn't arrive.