SPITE MARRIAGE (1929) B/W "silent" 77m dir: Edward Sedgwick

w/Buster Keaton, Dorothy Sebastian, Edward Earle, Leila Hyams, William Bechtel, John Byron, Hank Mann

Keaton's last "silent" film is also one of his most underrated. It's a very funny film about a pants-presser who becomes infatuated with a stage actress.

From the book Keaton by Rudi Blesh: "All the good sequences in Spite Marriage represent battles with one MGM executive or another. [Keaton had pleaded with the top brass at the studio to make SPITE MARRIAGE as a sound film, to no avail. This is just one of the problems the great clown had with the studio who saw him as more a deficit than an asset with the coming of sound.] One of these, in the early-Keaton parody vein, is a theater scene in which Buster, as an extra, completely wrecks a serious Civil War drama. The other is the finale, in which, on a yacht, he uncorks the old heroic, breathtaking acrobatics above and in the water, like those on the Truckee and Tahoe in Our Hospitality and on the Sacramento in Steamboat Bill Jr. Half flight and all speed and accuracy, they still shine, although the acrobat was thirty-four years old when Spite Marriage was made."