Cheap Buster Keaton Collection (The Cameraman / Spite Marriage / Free & Easy) (DVD) (Buster Keaton) (Buster Keaton) Price

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Customer Reviews of Buster Keaton Collection (The Cameraman / Spite Marriage / Free & Easy)

Rating The Cameraman and Spite Marriage!!! Not Free and Easy.
The Cameraman and Spite Marriage are both excellent Keaton classics. Of the two The Cameraman is the superior but Spite Marriage on its own would rate as a five star film. <
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>The Cameraman has everything you'd expect from a Keaton, great sight gags, inventive stunts and effects and a fun and exciting storyline. Warning: There are some segments where the monkey steals the show! <
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>Keaton plays the inept cameraman perfectly. One of the funniest in the swimming pool was used again by Peter Sellers in [[ASIN:6305308713 A Shot in the Dark]]. <
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>The Cameraman is a very funny film and definately one of Keaton's finest. <
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>Spite Marriage is another great Keaton outing. Dorothy Sebastian the lead actress was also Keaton's girlfriend around the time the picture was made. She unfortuneately had a drinking problem and was nicknamed "Slam Bang" Sebastian because she would fall down when she had too much to drink which was often. One of the funniest scenes in the movie (possibly an inside joke?) takes place after she has had too much to drink and Keaton has to put her to bed. Wonderful stuff. <
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>Free and Easy doesn't have much to offer. It's too bad this wasn't a lost film! One star for that one.

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To be a Keaton fan is to have your heart broken regularly...
...someone somewhere once wrote. This DVD set is an object lesson as to how that heartbreak occurred. It shows how Keaton declined in status from independent comic filmmaker to sad clown to someone whom the film industry considered an unemployable alcoholic in only a five year span, 1928 - 1933. Before you view this you should view Buster's silent features and shorts from the 1920s so that you get a full appreciation of the death of the career of a comic heavyweight. <
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>The Cameraman (1928), Buster's first film at MGM, is as good as any feature he did as an independent with maybe the exception of The General. This film largely left his original filmmaking team intact. Spite Marriage (1929), Buster's final silent film, is still a very good one, but it just seems to lack that complete Keaton signature present in his earlier features. A prime example of this is when Keaton's character tries to cheer up his new bride with a stuffed doll of a dog that has a tear in its eye. Buster never went for the sentimental approach when he had a completely free hand. At this point MGM had largely dismantled Keaton's filmmaking team and replaced them with their own people. Plus, they were interfering more with what Buster wanted to do with the story. The lesson MGM took away from the success of The Cameraman was not that Buster's approach and comic instincts were good, it was that their assembly line approach worked. <
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>The final blow is in 1930's "Free and Easy", Buster's third feature for MGM and his first talking picture. Here Buster has no creative control and has been reduced to a reciter of lines and performer of stunts while Robert Montgomery inexplicably crowds Keaton out of the limelight. To be fair, many very early talkie efforts suffer from the same set of problems as this one - bad dialogue, thin if not inane plots, musical numbers inserted where they really don't belong - overall the new talking picture technology being in the driver's seat rather than the art of film making. What makes this film so sad is that one of the most creative guys on the MGM lot has been reduced to "who's on first" type verbal gags that don't suit him, and in the closing number is a puppet swinging through the air in a clown's outfit with his puppet strings being controlled by figures off stage - a fitting visual metaphor for what is to come in Keaton's future MGM films. <
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>The 40 minute documentary that wraps up the set - "So Funny It Hurt: Buster Keaton and MGM" ties everything together and even has footage of Keaton himself talking about his decline at MGM. He was basically bewildered at how such bad films as his early talkies were such a success at the box office while his own silent works that he thought were so good had not been nearly as successful. This loss of both his self-confidence and a creative outlet as well as the break-up of his first marriage led to his descent into alcoholism and ultimately his dismissal from MGM. <
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>The odd thing about all of this is that Buster Keaton himself is probably the only person who didn't consider his treatment and string of bad luck a tragedy. From every source I've ever heard he always considered himself to be a very lucky man.

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Worth it just for The Cameraman
You could not find a more beautifully filmed, silent comedy than The Cameraman, Keaton's cinematographer on The Cameraman Eglin Lessley has a lot to do with this. Lessley returned to work with Keaton on The Cameraman after a period of working with Harry Langdon and others, Keaton and Lessley last picture before The Cameraman was Go West. The choice of Lessley is important, he has the ability to get an almost dream like quality to the picture which is just perfect for this movie and the storyline. There are a couple of scene that are just brilliant, one is the Pool (you know exactly where Rowan Atkinson got his ideas from) and the other is at the Beach when the girl goes off with his rival, he just breaks your heart. I also love the music that goes with this movie. <
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>Spite Marriage is of interest of course because of the fact that during the making of this movie Keaton and Sebastian started their on and off affair. The story should work and there are lots of little bits of business that are very funny, but somehow it just doesn't for me. Good chance to see Keaton's Yacht which is featured toward the end of the movie. <
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>Free and Easy is sad to watch, sad that MGM had no idea what to do with Keaton except dress him up as a clown and make him dance as a puppet. Not that I mind watching Buster sing and dance, just the costumes! I would rather watch Speak Easily than this.