Made back to back with the equally tepid Passionate Plumber, Speak Easily also stars Buster Keaton and Jimmy Durante, and makes me realize just how much sound changed the game. I say that because Keaton plays a different character in this - a verbose college professor who believes he inherited a fortune and finally decides to go out and live life - and it's not that he couldn't have played this in a silent film, but that using voice and language removes a certain ambiguity that allowed audiences to project something on the silent character. It's more defined, and so Keaton's natural sympathy is under threat, we can better choose to like or dislike him. I dunno. He still plays a literal-minded cluck and gets involved in a variety show on Broadway, but by then, I' admit I've stopped caring. I do enjoy this one for the verbal legerdemain, which proves Keaton can do other things (I've chosen to like the character), but even when it ends in the kind of chaos you usually got from his great silent films, it's still pretty ordinary. I mean, can you really ruin a show when that show is by all accounts already terrible?
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Siskoid
Made back to back with the equally tepid Passionate Plumber, Speak Easily also stars Buster Keaton and Jimmy Durante, and makes me realize just how much sound changed the game. I say that because Keaton plays a different character in this - a verbose college professor who believes he inherited a fortune and finally decides to go out and live life - and it's not that he couldn't have played this in a silent film, but that using voice and language removes a certain ambiguity that allowed audiences to project something on the silent character. It's more defined, and so Keaton's natural sympathy is under threat, we can better choose to like or dislike him. I dunno. He still plays a literal-minded cluck and gets involved in a variety show on Broadway, but by then, I' admit I've stopped caring. I do enjoy this one for the verbal legerdemain, which proves Keaton can do other things (I've chosen to like the character), but even when it ends in the kind of chaos you usually got from his great silent films, it's still pretty ordinary. I mean, can you really ruin a show when that show is by all accounts already terrible?MarthaMay
Surprisingly entertaining.daisyaday
http://www.archive.org/details/speak_easily