Spite Marriage

"Spite Marriage" is a dividing line for Buster Keaton, the film where he began to lose control of his career. It's still a delightful movie with innovative comedy and a moving storyline, once you get past the odd and ill-fitting retooling of Buster's screen image in the first act.

Elmer Gantry (Keaton) runs a laundry, which allows him plenty of time and access to fine clothes for stalking in the guise of a rich suitor stage star Trilby Drew (Dorothy Sebastian). Trilby attaches herself to fellow star player Lionel Benmore (Edward Earle), but when Benmore takes up with a society beauty, Trilby decides to marry Elmer to show him up, to her later regret.

"Spite Marriage" is Keaton's last silent comedy (except for a short called "The Railrodder" he made near the end of his career). It's better than several of the features he made before being picked up by MGM the year before, specifically "College," "Go West," "Three Ages," and "The Saphead." But it falls short of classic Buster, often because of the role played by Buster himself.

For almost all of the first 30 minutes, viewers have to adjust to the novel notion of Buster the idiot. After an abrupt opening, we see Buster fumbling around on horseback, wiggling lovelorn in his seat as Trilby performs on stage, and finally sneaking on stage to make a mess of the show. It is funny, but in a frustrating, jerky way.

Too often the film calls attention to Buster's fish-out-of-water character, particularly when he joins the cast and stumbles over assorted props, to the annoying amusement of the audience. In his earlier films, Buster was a stoic victim of mayhem, rather than producing it himself. This made the comedy work without lessening the character. Here, you can't help but emphasize with the theatrical agent who moans: "Shoot him! They'll think it's part of the act!"

There are also odd bits of sympathy trolling. We see him bring her a stuffed dog doll with a tear running down one eye. After he discovers Trilby has left him, the camera lingers on the doll one last time, as an overt nod to Elmer's pitiful state. It's like something out of Harry Langdon.

But there are compensations throughout the early part. Trilby's play, "Carolina," is a wonderful send-up of theatrical conventions. When Lionel makes his entrance as a wounded fugitive, he stops to acknowledge the applause. "A scratch is nothing to a Southern gentleman," he tells Trilby's character, a goofy line that gets a nifty callback late in the film.

Sebastian is a big part of why "Spite Marriage" works as well as it does. For the first time, I watched a Keaton feature not pining for Sybil Seely. Trilby is no gentle flower, but rather a scheming, petty character who uses Elmer's affection for her own ends. As an ex-spite boyfriend, I could relate to this. Most important, she is very funny, especially in a scene in a speakeasy where she gets drunk and loses her cool when she sees Lionel with his new babe. It's a great use of Buster's expressionless manner by director Edward Sedgwick and the MGM team, playing it off Sebastian's scowling and histrionics. She also takes a fall as well as Buster, which helps.

The movie's most famous scene uses her athleticism to splendid effect, where he tries to put his unconscious bride to bed. He tries to sit her on a chair, only to have her roll off. As other reviewers here note, it's easy to ignore the effort she must put forth, keeping Buster hopping without apparently moving a muscle.

The finale, aboard a yacht, is the film's best sequence. Ironically, as historians John Bengtson and Jeffrey Vance note in their helpful DVD commentary, this was one part of the movie Buster didn't want to do, probably concerned he was repeating "The Navigator." But "Spite Marriage" takes the same idea in different directions, and most importantly, ramps up the laughter while giving us Buster in take-charge form. A key bit of business involves his wearing a captain's hat, which seems to signal a sense of newfound authority for the performer.

Alas, it was not to be. Buster's subsequent work for MGM, while quite profitable, would run the gamut from weak to awful, with Buster himself anything but in charge. "Spite Marriage," with its misplaced emphasis on poor, stupid Elmer, would inaugurate this trend, but it's more of a piece with his days as silent comedy's master clown. Keep this in mind, and you will have a good time.

Buster Keaton's last silent comedy was a change of pace from his earlier, independent features, lacking many of his distinctive idiosyncrasies but adding a refreshingly modern love interest with determined, temperamental actress Trilby Drew (Dorothy Sebastian), who unlike most silent film heroines gets angry, gets drunk, and throws a few well-timed temper tantrums. Because it's a corporate comedy from the MGM assembly line the film can be a bit plot-heavy at times, but even so allows room for some now classic routines: a Civil War stage melodrama sabotaged by Buster's accident-prone performance; Buster attempting to put his dead-drunk bride to bed; and a heroic chase and rescue aboard an underworld yacht. If Keaton was now performing gags that might have been suited to anyone (many seem Chaplin-inspired), at least he was doing so with his usual grace and deadpan precision, and the film highlighted a more confidant, aggressive side to his personality rarely seen in his earlier films.

Well, it had to happen some time; in the course of a year's experience at MGM, Buster Keaton's features have finally left youth behind, and left it hard and fast. In "The Cameraman" his character was still the dreamy boy -- but that famous angular face has filled out into a sculpted adult mask, alabaster assuming the opaque authority of marble; no longer playing a college student but a nervy man in his thirties, this is the mature Keaton who will become familiar from the publicity material of the new decade.

He has abruptly grown into those strong bones at last. The alteration is not unbecoming, but it's undoubtedly somewhat marked.

As to why, precisely, I found myself speculating so extensively during the first half of the film on the changes in Keaton's personal appearance... I'm afraid it was because I didn't find it very funny.

The opening scenes have their moments, certainly. Dorothy Sebastian gets good material and can act, and so can Keaton -- when he's allowed. But too much of the humour I found simply to be farcical clowning: in an earlier film, the routine with the hats, for example, might have lasted a second or so for a throwaway laugh, but here it's milked far beyond what it can bear, and much of the other business I felt to be equally forced. There are moments that fly past with Keaton's old lightness of touch, such as the revelation of the true source of his elegant clothing, but there seems to be a general feeling that if a joke is worth doing once, it is worth labouring to death.

The sequence in which 'Elmer' disrupts the performance of the Civil War melodrama was, for me, more a matter of cringing than laughter; it's only fair to say that these sentiments were very definitely not shared by those in the seats nearby, and it may well just be a case of my aversion to the destructive nature of slapstick humour. But what I love about Keaton isn't his ability to fall over things and knock things down -- any comic worth his salt can do that -- it's the ingenuity and resourceful illogic of his invention at its best, and there's precious little of that on show here.

Fortunately, matters improve thereafter, as he is allowed a little more resource. Miss Sebastian shines during the restaurant scene, with Buster as second fiddle, and he is able to advance his relationship with his 'wife' during this section of the film into something a little more complex than fatuous knock-kneed idolatry. I have to confess that I didn't find the scene where he tries endlessly to put her to bed to be as classic as it's apparently held, although I did appreciate his typically Keatonesque solution to the chair problem, but the film definitely picks up from around this point.

The real enjoyment for me, however, only started when Elmer and the girl are left alone on the yacht together; it's almost as if a script that has been written to date by somebody else is taken over by an inspiration that's characteristically Keaton's, as both he and his character rise to the occasion. It occurs to me in passing to wonder if isolation of the filming crew aboard the yacht could possibly have helped foil studio interference..? But maybe it's simply that this is the Keaton we're used to, coming up with wonderfully complex schemes, disabling an entire crew of villains one by one or launching himself intrepidly into the unknown mysteries of the rigging. I was struck by the difference in tone between the sympathetic comedy of this section, where he tries to reduce sail with the help of the girl and the handicap of their joint ignorance, and the earlier, clumsy, 'varnishing' sequence, in which he is purely inept and we are expected to find it funny.

If the 'adrift alone' theme echoes "The Navigator", then the final knock-down fight inevitably recalls "Battling Butler"; as in that film, Keaton produces not only an athletic but a well-acted confrontation, as Elmer faces up to an opponent tall enough and strong enough to hold him ineffectual at arm's-length... armed only with bantam courage, and the luck and resolve that enable him to survive and keep coming back for more even as he visibly tires. And the payoff in the final line of this scene repaid, for me, all the clumsy physical clowning of the stage scenes earlier! (I must add that as a satire on overwrought drama, I actually find the depiction itself of the play "Carolina" quite funny; it's Buster's distinctly unsubtle involvement that grates on me so.)

At the start of "Spite Marriage", I'd have been hard put to rate it above a wavering 5 or 6, with the low comedy of scenes such as the riding encounter definitely toward the low end of that scale. I was pleasantly surprised to find it veering upwards as it went on, into the territory of 7 or above, and the ending I'd generally rate at an 8. (The return of the hat gag, I have to say, was not to my taste!) However, I cannot in all conscience give the film as a whole a ranking above about seven on my personal scale: worth watching, worth recommending to others, but not really worth going through discomfort or inconvenience to see.

Edit: re-watching this film with the original soundtrack (the love theme, "I'm Afraid of You", is certainly appropriate!), I'm impressed above all by Dorothy Sebastian's performance; now that I've seen his later work, Keaton's performance and material here actually reminds me more of his sound-era pictures. You may not be able to hear his voice, but you can certainly see a lot of the same mannerisms appearing...

This film is certainly not Buster Keaton's best work, though that's a very high bar. The plot meanders and lacks the charm and spontaneity we love from him. It too often relies on simple pratfalls, and there is not enough time devoted to his playful antics or wild stunts. The middle of the picture in particular is slow, and co-star Dorothy Sebastian acting drunk shows just how hard it is to do physical comedy that is sophisticated and funny, or to create something out of nothing, as Keaton so often does.

With all of that said, 'Spite Marriage' has a 34-year-old Buster Keaton still in his prime, and some pretty clever scenes. He gets enlisted into a stage play in the first part, and after botching up his make-up while another actor puts his on professionally, proceeds to foul up the production in various funny ways. As he tries to elude those chasing him afterwards, he does a rapid change into a top hat and tails that is both entertaining and shows off his muscular body. Later in the film, he does some impressive stuntwork on a yacht, at one point getting thrown off, and then as the yacht goes by quickly, catches a small boat trailing behind and hauls himself into it. Throughout the movie, he's lovable and a joy to watch. This was Keaton's last silent picture, and as the 1930's would not be kind to him, it marks a transition for him. If you can avoid comparing it to his masterpieces (which I know is tough!), you'll probably find it's well worth watching.

This isn't bad at all, as long as you don't hold it up to the standard that Keaton set in the features he made on his own. It has some very good sequences that make up for the more routine stretches, and it shows enough of Buster's comic genius to be worthwhile. Even when the gags are not especially creative, he gets as much mileage out of them as anyone could have.

The premise of the "Spite Marriage" is rather flimsy at best, and in other hands it probably would not have been even this good. It actually starts out pretty well, as the first part moves at a good pace, and includes a very good sequence with Buster's hapless character trying to take part in a play. It begins to peter out in the middle, though, as the premise begins to wear thin. For some reason, the bedroom sequence from this portion seems to be the best-remembered portion of the movie, but it really isn't one of the better parts of the film at all. But things pick up again in the last part, when the story takes a couple of unexpected turns, and the comedy also improves.

To be sure, it is a shame that Keaton was forced into the studio mold in pictures like this. It worked for many, but not for a unique talent like Buster. Still, at least this time the result is a generally entertaining movie with more than enough laughs to make it worth watching for anyone who enjoys silent comedies.