Parlor, Bedroom and Bath

A far funnier film than I was led to believe. All Keaton fans usually hate the Metro movies, but there are delights here. Reginald Denny makes an excellent farceur and the inimitable Charlotte Greenwood is a surprisingly good match with Keaton. They have some exhausting physical scenes with each other and somehow, it clicks. Buster undergoes more punishment in these pictures than the ones he wrote and directed. It is almost as if someone at MGM decided that masochism was what made him funny. Nevertheless, he manages to shine as a timid soul who turns himself into a very enthusiastic lover. The film is "stagey" in that it keeps at times to a rendering very much like a proscenium theatre. It's fast. And fun.

Buster talks! Seeing this 1931 talkie was somewhat of a shock. Sure, Buster stuck around long enough to make plenty of great sound films, but this one is early enough to still have the ambiance of a silent comedy, which it occasionally lapses into. Hearing Buster talk here was almost an unexpected surprise. The film does start off slow with too much time devoted to setting up the plot. However, once the characters arrive in the hotel, the comic action is non-stop. Buster is great, as always, but Charlotte Greenwood almost steals the show as Polly. A great early comedienne, unjustly forgotten and underrated. This film is actually a re-make of an earlier silent, which I would love to track down for comparison.

When I watched "Matinee at the Bijou" on Saturday afternoons on PBS during the early '80s, this was one of the movies featured there. It was also my first exposure to Buster Keaton having previously read about him in an encyclopedia of movie comics called "The Funsters". The most funny parts I remember from that first viewing was when he kept trying to do his "I Love You" routine while extending his arms to various women in a mechanical way. Now that I've watched this again on the "Industrial Strength Keaton" DVD collection, I found it even more funnier having just seen many of his silent shorts with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and his later TV appearances and industrial films. Okay, so maybe some of the dialogue was a bit contrived and some scenes were a bit frantic but still I managed to laugh during the whole thing especially during the free-for-all-finale. Also, Cliff Edwards as the bell boy and Charlotte Greenwood as the woman Buster was supposed to meet at the hotel deserve special mention for their chemistry with The Great Stone Face. Oh, and the reactions of Joan Peers as Nita, who's trying to get her husband jealous, as she reacts to Buster's accidental "moves" were also funny to me. Really, I was just doubled over with laughter at this one especially during some visual stuff like that car-train sequence or the wet-floor-everyone-slips-on scene. So on that note, if you're a Keaton fan curious about these early talkies with him, I highly recommend Parlor, Bedroom and Bath. P.S. Ms. Peers was another performer who's from my birthtown of Chicago, Ill.

"Parlor, Bedroom, & Bath" combines Buster Keaton's comic skills with a decent supporting cast and a light-hearted story about tangled romances. The first half is mostly bland, but things pick up later in the movie.

Jeff wants to marry his sweetheart Virginia, but Virginia refuses to get married until her fussy, spinsterish older sister Angie gets married first. When Jeff runs into (literally) mild-mannered nonentity Reggie Irving (Keaton), he decides to pass off Irving as a notorious playboy, to arouse Angie's interest. The plot also involves some other characters and their own romantic difficulties, and the build-up goes on for too long. It is all rather slow-going for much of the film, with the only laughs coming when Keaton gets an occasional chance to display his non-verbal comic ability. The part worth waiting for comes in the second half, when all of the characters converge on a hotel, in a lengthy and pretty good comic sequence.

Overall, it's not much when compared with Keaton's silent films. But if you watch, make sure to stick around for the last half of the film, when things get a lot funnier.

I have to agree with other commenters that this was a poor choice of films for Buster Keaton. The early part of the film is disappointing, as it provides Keaton with no opportunities to do the amazing physical stunts he's rightly famous for. I found it dismaying to see Keaton, who flipped over the rigging in "The Love Nest" and made the clotheslines his playground in "Neighbors" deflated by a half-slack garden hose.

But the hotel sequence, in which an amazonian blonde tries to teach Keaton's pathologically girl-shy character to be a real Casanova, turns things around. "Buster Keaton" and "screen kiss" are two ideas that don't seem to go that well together, but Keaton turns the combination into something that's purely his. Like the climax of "Steamboat Bill Jr.", Keaton's character finally seizes control of a situation where he's previously been a victim of circumstance. Suddenly he figures out how this works and charges ahead in his own unorthodox, exuberantly acrobatic way. And that moment is worth waiting for.