Cheap Speak Easily/Parlor, Bedroom & Bath (Video) (Edward Sedgwick) Price

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Customer Reviews of Speak Easily/Parlor, Bedroom & Bath

In SPEAK EASILY, Jimmy Durante is overbearing and unfunny. View Speak Easily only if you love Buster Keaton. But if you love Buster Keaton, it will make you sad. MGM should be ashamed of themselves.

PARLOR, BEDROOM & BATH is OK. However, it is inundated with lame jokes. Many operating on an Abbott & Costello level. Buster has some funny moments in the hotel, but not enough great moments. He has a few other isolated funny moments walking up and down the stairs. But that's it.

As mediocre as Parlor, Bedroom & Bath is, it is probably Buster's 2nd best MGM sound picture. IMO, just ahead of "Doughboys". After Parlor, Bedroom and Bath, the quality of Buster's films took a huge nosedive.

A Buster Double Feature
PARLOR, BEDROOM AND BATH (1931): "Parlor, Bedroom and Bath" (PB&B) is a farce comedy about a wealthy socialite who desires only dangerous men she can't be sure of. She's conned into believing that hum-drum Buster is a philandering Don Juan. The movie was partially filmed at Buster's goliath-size Beverly Hills estate. The most bizarre scene in PB&B is at the beginning, where we see Buster doing the poorman's job of hammering an advertisement to a telephone pole, with the Keaton mansion looming in the murky black and white distance. We get a tour of the swimming pool area and backyard, as the athletic Buster is chased throughout the grounds by handymen and gardeners. (I noticed that the film's production crew forgot to dismantle and remove Buster's sons' swingset, which had no business sitting on the lawn of a bourgeois, unmarried, childless woman's estate. Also within view is his kids' playhouse).

The second half of PB&B takes place in a hotel room where lots of door-slamming scenes occur. Some very funny lines emerge from these scenes. Buster plays opposite Cliff "Ukulele Ike" Edwards, whose character is the only bellhop I've ever seen who has the nerve to barge into a hotel suite without knocking first, always when Buster is making out with a girl.

SPEAK EASILY (1932): Buster's childhood spent less than 1 day in a schoolroom (mobile vaudeville upbringing), but in "Speak Easily" he was a good enough actor to pull off the dweeb-like role of Timolean (!) Zanders Post, a college professor who spews lines like "don't equivocate", "we may meet at some future time, per chance?", "the dance is anachronistic" and "there should be more sinuosity". I half-expected hearing a line like "I'm allergic to fowl", but it never emerged. The plot involves Timmy Post financing a no-talent vaudeville troupe's debut on Broadway. The vaudeville troupe's vocabulary uses words like "palooka", with Jimmy Durante at that helm.

By the time Buster made "Speak Easily" in 1932, his original comedic style from the 1920's of performing mechanical sight gags with dangerous acrobatic stunts had pretty much been squashed by his bosses at the MGM studios. However, in this film, I was surprised to find that they let him be dragged from a moving train and hang from the rafters of a theater. It was the last time he would be able to perform dangerous stunts in grade A films.

My editions of these films came on this 2-volume set. The price is very reasonable, but the films were recorded on LP speed. I wish the manufacturer had recorded on SP speed and given me better quality. The viewing quality is not bad, but I would not have minded paying a few dollars more for a clearer picture.

One out of two ain't bad!
I have been a Buster Keaton fan for a long time and was thrilled to find this 2-video set for such a low price - even though it had two movies that are considered past Keaton's prime. It didn't take me long to realize that the reason for the low cost was that both movies are recorded on the slow speed setting! Still watchable but certainly down a notch in recording quality. After reading Leonard Maltin's review I was expecting "Speak Easily" to be entertaining and "Parlor, Bedroom and Bath" to be a visual chore. However, I found the opposite to be true. "Speak Easily" relied too much on pseudo clever dialog and not nearly enough on Keaton's comical visual artistry (my best attempt at sounding like a movie snob). The only laugh I could muster was at the end of the movie when Buster got caught in a stage rope. This movie was interesting to me only as a curiosity. "Parlor, Bedroom, and Bath", however, was a pleasent surprise. Although it starts off slow it picks up when Buster's character, the naieve, innocent Reginald Irving, is encouraged to stage a romantic interlude with a woman. The resulting chaos that results reminds me of some of the later Marx Bros. movies (some of which Keaton helped out behind the camera). However, none of the Marx Bros. had Keaton's athleticism. Even my wife laughed out loud a number of times and this really isn't her favorite type of humor.

If you haven't seen a Buster Keaton movie before please look at one of his earlier silent works first (e.g. The General, Sherlock Jr.) because the films included in this box set are not even close to his best (his movies got less entertaining as he lost creative control). But for those of you like me who are fans of Keaton and know what he's capable of, you might find "Parlor, Bedroom & Bath" an interesting and entertaining treat. Don't bother with "Speak Easily" unless you, like me, are trying to collect all of Keaton's films.