My Wife's Relations

Polish in this movie sucks. I'm from Poland and I laugh when I was reading polish subs in film. There are so many mistakes in it. I think someone who doesn't know polish made it. Sometimes I had to guess what words that was meant to be. The movie is OK, I like Buster Keaton very much, but polish subs are horrible. Buster Keaton is always funny even with his stone face. I don't know why the judge was speaking only polish. Works in USA but don't know the language? The best part of the movie took place in bride's house, when Buster meets her family for the first time. Buster Keaton's short movies are even better than short movies made by Charles Chaplin. I give 6/10.

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.

The sudden and mistaken marriage of Keaton to an unlikely bride is the incident that forms the basis for the plot. Confronted by animalistic in-laws, who would be any groom's nightmare, Keaton maneuvers through their opportunism and materialism. Somehow the pieces don't quite fit together. There are episodes that are almost very funny, but not quite. Perhaps grounded too deeply to contemporary reality, I'm never able to accept the premise that Keaton would acquiesce to this marriage without any form of challenge. Perhaps that direction in plot would have produced a greater opportunity for Keaton's brand of comedy to shine.

In the world where people misunderstand each other perfectly Buster Keaton is accidentally wedded with intimidating woman (Kate Price) with even more intimidating brothers. Buster is not very welcome in the family and he gets bullied around until one of the brothers finds an envelope in the Buster's pocket. Inside the envelope is a letter that declares that he has inherited $100.000. Suddenly all the family starts to take care of Buster - they treat him good (well, almost) and they rent an expensive mansion. Then they discover that the letter wasn't for Buster, and all hell breaks loose.

The film has some quite funny and clever moments, but they are just moments. Like usually in the Buster Keaton's movies, this time the story doesn't go nowhere and random stunts (as magnificent as they are) are just random stunts in random order. Seems bit wasted opportunity, considering the talents of Buster Keaton. Still, it is fun and entertaining enough to spend your 25 minutes.

"Papa! Shut your eyes and see what I married!"

Buster finds himself accidentally married to a shrewish woman with a lowbrow family in this one. The highlights for me were in smaller moments, like Buster striking various poses during the family photograph, or gently putting a brick under a guy's head after he's knocked him unconscious with it. The big chase through the mansion while the homebrew suds overflow was anticlimactic, though it included the clever gag of rolling himself up into a carpet and hurtling down the stairs to send his pursuers flying, and it was neat to see him descending from the third floor of a building like a circus acrobat using the window awnings. Overall, however, there just wasn't a lot of charm here, and it seemed less inspired to me. It's still Buster Keaton though, and he had my full attention. Even when he's just average, he's engaging.