College

Comment: ****note: possible spoilers

This film reminded me a lot of Harold Lloyd's "The Freshman," in which Harold goes out for sports in college to impress a girl - same story - and made two years earlier. I am partial to Lloyd's version but I enjoyed this, too.

Keaton's version starts off with the high school graduation ceremony. "Ronald" (Keaton), the scholar of the class, gives a speech denouncing athletics as a total waste of time and promoting being a bookworm over anything else. This speech is so offensive to the crowd that everyone leaves but Keaton's mom, who applauds. By the way, all the high school graduates look between 25-35 years of age. These are the oldest-looking high school seniors in history!!

Anyway, a girl Buster is trying to impress "Mary Haynes" (Anne Cornwall), was among those not impressed with his snobby "scholar" speech. She'd rather have an athletic man. So, upon entering college, "Ronald" tries a variety of sports, to gain the approval of the girl. (Does this theme sound familiar, not just in the Lloyd film but so many of Keaton's other films?)

He attempts to play baseball but is so clueless he puts on all the catcher's equipment to play third base. Suffice to say, after a number of plays ensue, it's more than evident that "Ronald" is a little bit out of his element! Next, he goes out for track, but gets discouraged when two little kids speed by him on the track. Throwing the discus and javelin are not good ideas, either. His high-jumping routine is very funny. He isn't bad in the hurdles, however. Obviously, pole vaulting doesn't work and the hammer throw almost gets his teammates killed, so he's told to leave.

He gets a call from the Dean's office. The Dean, who liked him from the start because he preferred studies over sports, is distressed because Buster's grades are bad. Buster explains his problems and the Dean (played by the always-funny Snitz Edwards) sympathizes because, being a wimpy little guy, he same problem years ago with a woman he liked. So, as a favor, Dean Edwards orders the rowing coach to install Buster as the coxswain of the team. The coach and the crew don't want this, as "Little Lord Fauntleroy" or "Mama's Boy" and other names he's called, has a reputation already at college as an athletic loser. They try to sabotage his attempt at being part of their crew, but he turns the tables. The funniest scene is when the new coxswain literally becomes the boat's rudder.

The neatest part of the film is the ending, which is usually the case in silent comedies. Suffice to say that Buster puts all of his athletic talents, which were not effective on the sports fields, to good use to get the girl. It's a memorable ending.

I saw this as part of the big DVD set of "The Art Of Buster Keaton." The transfers in all of them are magnificent.

Comment: The sophomoric 1927 Buster Keaton silent comedy "College" lacks the overall creativity of "The General" (1927), "Steamboat Bill, Jr.," (1928) and "The Cameraman" (1928). Buster's gags and routines are tame compared with the three aforementioned epics. Nevertheless, "College" isn't completely without merit. The irony, for example, is that the physically fit Buster plays a protagonist without any athletic ability until the villain endangers our hero's sweetheart. Like Charles Chaplin, Buster exploited incongruity as the source for his comedy. "College" is basically your boy wants girl, boy loses girl, and then boy wins girl back nonsense.

"On the sunkist slopes of the Pacific where land and water meet--California" reads the opening title card. Rain pelts Union High School auditorium as people huddle under newspapers and umbrellas. The opening 10 minute-plus scene depicts Buster's high school graduation day "where the next step is either to go to college or go to work." Buster arrives at graduation with his mother. Although Ronald has brought an umbrella, his cheap $15 suit shrinks up on him as that he looks ridiculous. This gag and his problems closing an umbrella gag are clever and cute. This is the most non-traditional graduation because nobody wears caps and gowns. They had to otherwise everybody would have looked the same and we would never have seen Buster's suit shrink. All in all, this is the most thought out and calculated sequence in "College."

Mary Haynes--the heroine--has a memorable introduction. The male students remove several coats that they had generously allowed her to bundle up in to avoid getting drenched. She is described as "the winner of every popular contest in which the boys were allowed to vote. When she receives his diploma, the principal predicts that she will fit in at Clayton College as she did at Union High School. Star athlete Jeff Brown (Harold Goodwin) appears amid fanfare. He is described "as a man who loved exercise so much that he has made many a girl walk home." When the principal hands Jeff his diploma, he notes that Jeff took seven years to earn it. Lastly, the principal congratulates Buster for being "the most brilliant scholar." Of course, everybody laughs at Buster because his suit has shrunken so much that the buttons on his vest have popped off and his sleeves have retreated virtually to his elbows.

Buster alienates everybody at graduation with his anti-athletic speech. As the top student, he receives an honor medal. "The student who wastes his time on athletics rather than study show only ignorance." His words anger Jeff and the other fellows. "Future generations depend upon brains and not upon jumping the discus or hurdling the javelin." Mary (Anne Cornwall) criticizes Ronald. "When you change your mind about athletics then I'll change my mind about you." She rides away with Jeff.

Mary enters Clayton College. Neither Ronald nor his mother can afford the tuition, so Ronald looks for a job so he can work his way through school. He gets a temporary job as a soda jerk clerk. He carries a picture of Mary around in his suitcase and boards in the dormitory. The soda clerk job doesn't last long because Ronald is afraid that Mary will see him in such a lowly job and ridicule him so he quits.

Dean Edwards (Snitz Edwards) congratulates Ronald about his maturity. He praises him, "A boy like you can make this athlete infested college a seat of learning once more." Eventually, Ronald quits his soda jerk job when Mary enters the shop. Ronald decides he wants to take a try at sports. Ronald gets on the baseball team and his idiotic antics result in his team losing. Jeff and some guys catch him walking home from the disastrous baseball game and toss him on a blanket in the air. He sails so high that he can see an old battle axe dressing through her balcony window. Infuriated, she storms onto the balcony and swats at him with an umbrella. More umbrella buffoonery! He seizes the umbrella and floats up and down until he tears down a balcony and brings down the battle axe on it.

Ronald tries out for track and other related athletics and again fails miserably. Pay close attention to these shenanigans because they play an important part in the conclusion. Looking for work, Buster masquerades as an African-American in a restaurant. The black paint on his face smears off when he is serving Jeff and Mary on a date. When the blacks discover that he's an imposter, they run him off. Eventually, the Dean summons our hero to his office and complains about Ronald's failing grades. "I took up athletics because the girl I love thinks I'm a weakling," Buster explains in his own defense. The Dean requests that the rowing coach make Buster the coxswain on the rowboat team. The coach, however, has other ideas and he slips Buster a mickey. Things don't work out for the coach and the person intended to replace Buster gulps the potion. The photography for the boat rowing race is incredibly good. One of the boats has the semi-profane name 'Damfino.' This too must have been pretty risqué for its day.

Ultimately, Jeff shows his true antagonistic colors when he locks Mary in her dorm room and stays with her. She warns him that his being caught in her room will mean expulsion for both of them. Jeff points out that he has been expelled already. Mary calls Ronald for help and he responds with alacrity. The last nine minutes of "College" portray Ronald as an entirely different kind of guy and the ending is truly odd. Again, "College" is not top-notch Keaton, but it is worth watching and the DVD is available in a Kino International print on Genius Entertainment for under a dollar in some stores.

Comment: The theme of this Kino DVD of Buster Keaton films seems to be education.

First, there is the feature film, 1927's "College". Here Keaton plays Ronald the bookworm. He graduates from high school, apparently the valedictorian, and gives a graduation speech on the evils of athletics. The girl he loves - Mary - tells him she won't consider him as a suitor unless he changes his attitude. Ronald enters Clayton College where his endeavors in a number of sports - and jobs - are rich with gags. The villain of the picture is played by Harold Goodwin, who was actually a lifetime friend of Keaton's.

"College" is no doubt one of Keaton's weaker features. It was made right after his pride and joy, "The General", failed miserably at the box office. Thus, Keaton wasn't really in the mood to exert himself either physically or creatively in his next picture. The irony in this film is, of course, that Keaton was a superb athlete and even acrobat. He was good enough at baseball that many feel he could have played professionally, so the scene where he messes up the baseball game for Clayton College is particularly ironic.

The other college-oriented film on this DVD is the two-reeler "The Electric House". Graduation day at P.U. finds Keaton's character graduating with a degree in botany. He is seated next to a girl graduating with a degree in cosmetology and a man with a degree in electrical engineering. The dean (Big Joe Roberts) asks for someone to take on the job of wiring his house for electricity while he is away on vacation. Just prior to this the diplomas get scrambled and Keaton winds up with the engineering one. Thus, the job winds up going to him. The dean drives away from his home with Keaton sitting at the curb diligently reading "Electricity Made Easy". When the dean returns Keaton has wired the house in only a way that Buster could divise making heavy use of automated trains - Keaton's favorite prop. The plot is complicated when the real engineer shows up at the dean's house in search of revenge.

"Hard Luck" is the third film, and is a partially lost two-reeler. At the time this DVD was released, three minutes were missing along with the short's final gag which had to be described with still photos. Because of the missing portions, the film can be hard to follow. Buster plays a man who has been fired from his job and dumped by his girl and is seeking a way to end it all. He is unsuccessful in all of his attempts, and ends up working for some zoological society. The short duration of most of Keaton's gags make the missing scenes easy to take. To see the final scene restored to "Hard Luck" take a look at the Keaton Plus DVD. Keaton always claimed that scene got the biggest laugh of all of his films.

The final two-reeler is "The Blacksmith". This film bears a strong resemblence to the Keaton/Arbuckle collaboration "The Garage". Here Keaton is the somewhat inept assistant to a bully (Big Joe Roberts) in a garage where he works as a combination blacksmith and auto mechanic. Ordinary props and tools of the trade become instruments of mischief and mayhem, along with some not-so-ordinary devices of Buster's own design. During this short film he completely wrecks a new Rolls Royce, a car that retailed for ten thousand dollars back in the early 20's. Did the Keaton Studios have the budget for the destruction of such a vehicle? Some have conjectured that this might have been the Rolls Royce that Keaton received as a wedding present from his brother-in-law and benefactor, Joe Schenck. Also conjectured is that the scene where he is shoeing a horse and equating it with trying to sell shoes to a finicky female customer could have been a dig at his new wife's excessive clothes shopping. This film was made about a year after his marriage to Natalie Talmadge - a marriage that even started out on very rocky ground, and these would have been the kind of passive-aggressive stunts that Keaton was well known for.

The scores are excellent on these Keaton Kino DVDs, even if the video is somewhat less than perfect. There are no extra features on the DVD.

Comment: Its not the critics' choice for best Keaton movie. They vote either THE GENERAL or THE NAVIGATOR. Nor is it my personal favourite which is STEAMBOAT BILL JR. But COLLEGE is so architecturally perfect that when you add the Keaton inventiveness (who HASN'T borrowed from this movie?) & add the Keaton execution & timing perhaps the concept 'best' doesn't really matter. In this one Keaton is the class bookworm who in his valedictory speech praises scholarship over athletics. Afterward the girl he is sweet on lets him know that she is not pleased. Keaton decides to follow her to college & enroll in athletic programmes to impress her. He fails at every sport but so winningly that you look forward to every defeat. While he is losing on the field he's also losing at the jobs he takes (first as a soda jerk then as a waiter at an African-American owned & run restaurant) to earn money for his tuition. Here Keaton juggles, tumbles & somersaults so spectacularly that he defined the word 'pratfall' forever. The only thing comparable are Baryshnikov's jumps that seem to come out of nowhere. You may find your jaw dropping & asking 'How did he do THAT?'. In the end of course he takes the team to victory & when he learns his sweetheart is in distress he sprints, dashes, runs, jumps, hurdles & pole-vaults to her rescue. All done with such perfect timing you may find yourself on your feet cheering him on. Never was damsel so beautifully saved. If you ever have a chance to see this one in a theatre: GO.

Comment: This movie is good, lots of laughs, and an interesting ending. Plus Keaton's muscles made it a good watch.