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When bookish professor Post (Buster Keaton) learns he has inhreited 750.000
Dollars (a hoax, as it would eventually turn out), he decides to finally start
enjoying his life, & before he knows it, he is aboard a train with a
theatre group touring the rural parts of the country, with no success. Only
professopr Post is fascintated by their theatre performance, & especially
dancing girl Pansy (Ruth Selwyn), & when the group runs into financial
difficulties, he helps them out, & when the group learns about the money
the professor is supposed to have, they persuade him to take their show to
Broadway, New York. On Broadway the little production is soon in the news, as
there seems to be a fotrune behind it, & especially dancing girl
Elenor (Thelma Todd), a golddigger by profession, suddenly shows an
overwhelming interest to get a part in the show ... & a part of the
professor's money. She even tries to get him into an inciminating situation,
which he gets out of first & foremost by his own clumsiness. The night of
the premiere is also the night it comes out the professor has no money at all,
but the production has a huuge pile of debts, & to get at least the
premiere onto the stage, pianist Jimmy (Jimmy Durante) thinks it best to send
the professor away, not only away from the theatre but out of New York. Somehow
the professor makes it to the premiere anyways though, & thanks to his
clumsiness totally ruins the show .... much to the enjoyment of the audience
who think the professor is the comical number. & in the end the show is
bought by one of the biggest Broadway impresarios, & the professor gets the
girl (Pansy that is).
Buster Keaton seems to be one of the many
lamentable victims of the arrival of sound film, but not because his voice or
acting wasn't up to it (like in so many other cases), but because
MGM-wunderkind Irving Thalberg - a man of remarkably little understanding of
good comedy, see the Marx
Brothers's A Night at the Opera - finally found a tool to
defeat Buster with: Jimmy Durante. Now Jimmy Durante on his own wasn't
essentially an unfunny man, but his spitfire Brooklyn-accent wisecracks
complimented very badly with Keaton's sophisticated slapstick (which, with the
arrival of sound, also seemed a thing of the past), & many films had him
fighting with Keaton for screen-dominance - even though his role was mostly
insignificant for the plot. The result is as expected, once Keaton is left on
his own, he cooks up some genuinely funny scenes (like when he gets drunk with
Thelma Todd or singlehandedly ruins the stage performancee he put onto the
stage in the first place), but once the story sets in, one can't help but not
care. Irving Thalberg obviously didn't see the error of his ways, as he in
1932/33 teamed up Durante & Keaton not only in Speak Easily but also
The Passionate Plumber & What! No Beer?, after which Buster
Keaton's career as slapstick star was essentially over until the arrival of
television. However, Keaton's heavy alcoholism might be partly blamed for that.
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