Shérif malgré lui

I've mostly ever known Buster by his short features in the late 1910s and early 1920s as well as his great feature length movies throughout the 20s but little did I know of his 1930s short comedies for Educational Pictures, the first one of them being The Gold Ghost.

It's a rather simple story of a man who just wanted to prove himself worthy to this world and to the girl that he liked, and he ends up in the ghost town in Nevada and decides to take over as its sheriff. The narrative is rushed and doesn't get much time for development of the character - instead it utilizes as many gags as it can, and it gives plenty thanks to the setting.

Buster is a master when it comes to slapstick and physical comedy and he does the job pretty well in this short, earning more than a chuckle not once. Sadly he loses it by the end of it and when there comes the time for a final brawl it feels awkward and not very well choreographed. Add here bad sound editing and dialogue delivery - people seem to be talking from the far end of the room when they are right in front of us on the screen and most of the times their lips move but the sound is inaudible - and you'll get a fine 20 minute comedy flick that could have easily been one of Buster's best if it was silent and was made in the year 1920. But as of 1934 it is just ok.

"The Gold Ghost" isn't the best of Keaton's sound-era shorts (that would be "Grand Slam Opera") but it's well above average for this grim period in his career.

Buster and a motley group of people end up out West in an old mining town. The gold mine has long since been tapped out, and the town is deserted ... a "ghost town" in the figurative sense, but also a ghost town literally when Buster has a brief encounter with the ghost of a saloon-girl. (This movie really has nothing to do with spooks.)

Buster appoints himself sheriff, but then he has to deal with a crook on the lam, played by Warren Hymer. Hymer is one of my favourite supporting actors. He had an extremely narrow range -- he nearly always played dim-witted crooks -- but he never failed to give a funny performance, and he's quite good in this film.

Watch out in "The Gold Ghost" for an actor named Joe Young, who looks and sounds exactly like ROBERT Young (of "Father Knows Best") hiding behind a moustache. Film historian David Shipman has written that this actor *is* Robert Young, using an alias. That's not true: the actor Joe Young in this film is Robert Young's lookalike brother, a movie-star wanna-be who had to grow a moustache in order to look different from his brother and have any sort of acting career at all. I'll give "The Gold Ghost" 7 out of 10 ... and two of those points are for Warren Hymer's deft performance.

In his first Educational comedy Buster Keaton touches and mannerisms are back in abundance after years of the creative straitjacket that was MGM. I find his Educational shorts liberating despite the low budgets that were imposed upon the brilliant comedian. After five years of being told what was funny by studio executives Keaton is back in charge and calling the shots as evident by the delightful first reel of THE GOLD GHOST, which is played basically silent. Buster roams around a deserted, ram-shackled ghost town where chairs and tables collapse, doors fall off their hinges and wooden walkways disintegrate when used. Warren Hymer eventually turns up so Buster has someone to play cards with in a rising cloud of dust.

None of these gags are truly ingenious on their own but they are all engaging as a whole as Keaton gets his feet wet returning to the two reel format that he began his film career in supporting Roscoe Arbuckle. Who else but Keaton would throw a deck of cards at a gang of assailants and then stand and watch as the cards scattered with the wind?

It's nice to have Buster back.

Keaton's first screen work after his career collapsed at MGM due to drunkenness, the breakup of his marriage and frustration is a pleasant little piece. True, it lacks the absurdity bordering on surrealism of his great silent shorts, but it does have Keaton at work in a sound film doing what he had always thought was his best mode of operation: interpolating his silent stuntwork in a long sequence in which the only 'ghosts' appear: a dance hall girl and some ghostly bandits, whom he kills -- although they may only exist in his imagination. The sequence includes some fine pratfalls. Not a great work by any means, it is certainly worthwhile for anyone who loves Keaton's work, as do I.

Well, maybe Fool's Gold... No it's not "vintage" Keaton, but it's pretty dang good! Educational Pictures gets slammed all the time for being so low-budget, but here is a whole broken-down frontier's town for Buster to play with, complete with ghosts, mobsters, and a dang hell of a lot of extras! It's a quickie-film, as if Buster were trying out sound for the first time to see what he could do, and on a very smallish experimental level I think it works pretty good. Of the entire 16 Educational shorts he made, my vote for best of the bunch is "The Chemist". ("Grand Slam" has been over-rated for years, and doesn't come close, in my opinion.) Buy the set from Kino and check these out for yourself!