Pest from the West

"The Pest from the West" has the honor of being considered the best of the short subjects that Buster Keaton starred in for Columbia Pictures. Perhaps that's partially because it was released first and got a lot of exposure, but while I'm not sure it's so many lightyears ahead of the other Keaton Columbia shorts, it it very funny, and allows the gags and comic situations to build throughout the short.

While the material gets to build in a satisfactory way, though, this is somewhat oddly contrasted with the fact that the short seems a little contextless as a whole. Buster plays some kind of odd, moneyed man who seems to travel around the globe in a small boat with a large collection of local costumes and three loyal servants, and then falls instantly in love with a Mexican waitress. Maybe it feels like we're missing a good bit of what is going on here because much of the material for "The Pest from the West" was pulled from an earlier Keaton feature film.

It certainly LOOKS the best of all the Columbia shorts, with sets nicely dressed up as Mexico, and plenty of location shots at a dock. The outdoor scenes at the water accent the humor of the great rule-of-three gag with Buster's sailors pushing off when he's only gone back to the boat to fetch something. There's the subtle advantage too of some background music -- rare in Columbia shorts but, like it did in a lot of great Hal Roach films, enhancing the pleasant, comedy atmosphere -- coming from the Mexican band in the café. Unfortunately, the supporting players in this film are quite terrible and wooden, especially Richard Fiske as Ferdinand the Bullfighter, who it's almost shocking to think was ever allowed to deliver a line again.

This all isn't too much of a problem, though, since Buster himself gets most of the material. He handles it very well, of course, with his standout physical bit involving trying to dance while his shoes are stuck to the ground. Also the novelty of hearing Buster Keaton sing is certainly, well, a rare one -- and it is part of a well-timed gag sequence.

There's a lot of very funny material here, though slightly let down by the weak support Buster has to play off of, and the setup leaves us a little bewildered.

This is the first and indeed the best of Buster Keaton's ten Columbia shorts. Most of these suffer from Stooge-style slapstick and heavy-handed direction,

but this first effort is great fun to watch. (Buster himself liked this one best, according to the late Mrs. Keaton.) In this reworking of his 1936 feature "An Old Spanish Custom," Buster plays an international tourist who falls for a pretty senorita. But he has several run-ins with belligerent locals, each resulting in a hasty retreat, a quick change of costume, and Buster coming back for more.

Exhibitors and audiences loved this film in 1939, and it was the first Columbia two-reeler selected for re-release (in 1948). It's still a crowd-pleaser today; this writer attended a screening where the audience members didn't just applaud -- they cheered!

Aside from an amusing sequence in which Buster serenades the leading lady, this talkie two-reeler suffers from weak, tired material. The atmosphere is seedy and and the gags are uninspired (e.g. Buster repeatedly falls off a boat). This short was a reworking of a feature-length comedy Buster made in England a few years earlier, variously known as "The Invader" or "An Old Spanish Custom," and although the remake represents an improvement over the original it nonetheless falls far short of what Keaton could achieve in his heyday. Poor Clyde Bruckman, author of the screenplay, fell back on some desperate ploys to perk things along, putting Buster in a procession of exaggerated ethnic costumes for laughs. I guess they figured if that shtick started getting old, Buster could always fall off the boat again. The story limps along to a flat, anticlimactic ending, and viewers who've never seen the star in anything else could be excused for wondering what his legendary reputation is based on.

The serenade gives us a hint of Buster's vaudeville past and is certainly the comic high point. In this sequence he attempts to perform "In a Little Spanish Town" for the leading lady, singing in his croaky voice while accompanying himself on a ukulele. Her exasperated neighbor (comedy stalwart Bud Jamison) pummels him with flower pots throughout the number, all dropped to the beat. It's a cute routine, seen to best advantage in the documentary "Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow."

For me, the biggest problem here is that Buster is once more stuck playing the hapless lunkhead character featured in the worst of his MGM features, another "Elmer" type who appears to be sleepwalking, unaware that the leading lady is playing him for a sucker. This sure isn't the attractive, resourceful guy who was the hero of THE GENERAL. Keaton was still fairly young at this point and capable of better work than we see here (as he would prove on TV in the '50s), but the people in charge at Columbia Pictures didn't know how to use his abilities properly or else they just didn't care.

Fans usually assert that this was the best of Buster's series of short comedies for Columbia, and unfortunately that seems to be the case: some of the others are downright painful to watch. Such a sad waste of talent. Masochistic Keaton buffs will watch the Columbia shorts anyhow, but everyone else should stick with his silent work to see the man at his best.

Newly hired from the notorious, but successful Columbia Short department in 1939 Keaton decided to open his score with a rework of his failed UK feature THE INVADER, a film with some interesting moment, but very overlong and with no proper ending. For PEST FROM THE WEST cutting down the story to 20 min did a good thing, also the film benefits from some nice setting, reused from Columbia features. The beginning is a bit shaky, the falling-of–the-boat gag is a bit overworked, but even this is saved by a single great line. The second part then is beautiful constructed, beginning with Keaton starts singing "In a little Spanish town" armed with a ukulele and ending this song after a wild chase, this time a stolen guitar in hands. It is not exactly 100% Keaton, but it is still very funny. Keaton hated most of his films he did for Columbia and it is clear why. The fast and often careless way of making these films didn't mix with his attitude towards comedies. But for this time he could pick the story and rework this with the talented director Del Lord, so the result was much better then expected. This didn't seem to be the case for most of the remaining nine other shorts he made for Columbia between 1939 and 1941, but they all became quite a box office hit. It is a bit ironic, but for Keaton, who was basically blacklisted as a performer in Hollywood before that, this success reopen doors for him a little. His part in the A-feature Hollywood CAVALCARD was apparently a direct result of that and (slowly but anyway) the things starts to get better for Keaton. P.S. Columbia tries to lure Keaton back in 1942, but he resisted. Enough was enough.

Pest from the West (1940)

* (out of 4)

Buster Keaton's first short for Columbia is one of his worst. He plays a millionaire who sails to Mexico where he falls in love with a woman but what he doesn't know is that she has a psychotic boyfriend who will kill anyone. It goes without saying but this is an incredibly horrid short that doesn't feature a single laugh in it. This is a reworked version of Keaton's also horrible The Invader so neither version is really worth viewing. This is an incredibly lazy short as the same gags are used over and over throughout the film. The jokes weren't funny the first time around and they're even worse on the fifth time. These jokes include Keaton falling into the water as well as putting on the wrong outfit for Mexico.