Tuesday, December 7, Turner Classic Movies is saluting Buster Keaton by airing seven of his films and a new documentary entitled So Funny It Hurt. Both the documentary and the films they've chosen to air direct our attention to Buster's years at MGM when he made the transition from silent pictures to sound, from having control over his movies to not having control, from being a working comedian to being an unemployable alcoholic and from being a top box office star to something very close to a charity case. They're running one film from the earlier period when he had his own studio — a very funny short called The Balloonatic.
Then they have most of the early films he made for MGM after his studio was dissolved, starting with The Cameraman, which turned out to be the last Keaton movie up to his old standard. It starts the TCM presentation and then, since they're running the following in the order produced, you can watch the sad decline of perhaps America's greatest solo comedian: Spite Marriage is followed by Free and Easy, which is followed by Parlor, Bedroom and Bath, which is followed by The Passionate Plumber and What! No Beer?
Then, for some reason, they're running The Balloonatic at the end, out of sequence, perhaps to remind you that the co-star of What! No Beer? was once a great clown. (Here's a page with the whole listing and some good facts, photos and even some brief video clips.)
It will be interesting to see to what extent the documentary — which airs twice during the above marathon — faults the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio for Keaton's quick decline into failure. The company was not wholly to blame, perhaps not even primarily to blame. Buster already had a self-destructive tendency to drink too much and sleep with all the wrong people, and a lot of folks who were very funny in silent films never quite mastered talkies.
Still, the studio seems to have dealt with his problems by exerting controls that made things worse, and the films he was in went pretty much in that direction. (Oddly enough, TCM is skipping over Doughboys, the one Keaton movie in this period that briefly reversed the downslide.) Ultimately, the story of Keaton in the thirties is a sad one, and there's very little about it that's funny. The same could be said, by the way, of What! No Beer? You might want to give that one a pass.