Les parents de ma femme

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.

While routine in parts, this short comedy has some good moments. The story has Buster trying to deal with a crew of nightmarish in-laws, and the general understanding is that the material hit pretty close to home for him when he made this. When film-makers put too much of their own lives into their movies, it doesn't always lead to the best on-screen product, and some of the material here seems more labored than usual. The setup is quite creative, but some of the punch lines don't really come off. Still, it has some funny moments, and most Keaton fans will want to take a look.

Buster winds up married to a harridan and finds himself sharing a house with her, her surly father and four brutish brothers. They treat him abominably until they begin to think he might be well-off ... Made a year after Buster had got married and was single-handedly supporting his wife's large family, this is one of his more auto-biographical shorts, and feels rather bitter. Some very funny scenes, but not one of the genius' best.

"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.