Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 02/11/25

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Battling Butler (Buster Keaton, 1926)

Cast: Buster Keaton, Snitz Edwards, Sally O'Neil, Walter James, Budd Fine, Francis McDonald, Mary O'Brien, Tom Wilson, Eddie Borden. Screenplay: Paul Gerard Smith, Al Boasberg, Charles Henry Smith, Lex Neal, based on a play by Stanley Brightman and Austin Melford. Cinematography: Bert Haines, Devereaux Jennings.

Rich man Alfred Butler (Buster Keaton) goes glamping with his valet (Snitz Edwards) and falls in love with a backwoods maiden (Sally O'Neil). When he's mistaken for the lightweight boxer Alfred "Battling" Butler (Francis McDonald), he has to prove his manly prowess to her burly father (Walter James) and brother (Budd Fine). Unfortunately, Keaton's comic routines in the boxing ring pale in comparison with Charles Chaplin's boxing scene in City Lights (Chaplin, 1931). Keaton gets more laughs from entering the ring, getting tangled in the ropes, than he does while in it. Not one of Keaton's more inventive feature films, Battling Butler suffers a little from predictable plotting, derived from a Broadway musical that starred Charles Ruggles. Still, even a second-tier Keaton film is better than almost anyone else's standout movie.