Spite Marriage (1929)

I hope some of you have taken advantage of the Buster Keaton season at the NFT or the one on Sky Cinema (which is being repeated this week).  The above film was his last silent and unfortunately it marked the end of a brilliant career.  His subsequent talkies for MGM were patchy, as he lost creative control, and the balance of his life produced disappointments and a squandering of his talent.  It takes something very special to reduce a modern audience to helpless laughter nearly eighty years on, and this film has it in spades.  While there were a few dull patches, it also contained some of his most classic routines, especially trying to put his drunken wife to bed (special praise here for his female lead as well).  She has married him to spite her faithless lover and it takes any number of catastrophes to finally make love bloom between them.  On a completely different level, one can't help but love the great Buster.