Keaton at the Crossroads: Buster’s Last Silent Comedy, Spite Marriage

In later years, Buster Keaton referred to his signing of a contract with MGM as “the worst mistake of my career.” In 1928 it was purely a business decision. The last few films he had made for his own production company had been expensive and less profitable than he had hoped. MGM was a huge and successful company, as powerful as the lion that was its mascot. Working there would, in theory, remove the burdens that came with being an independent and allow him to concentrate on the films themselves. Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd warned Buster against it, telling him he would be unhappy inside the machinery of a major studio, but Buster couldn’t see the problem. From his first day in front of a camera in 1917 until that moment, he had had the luxury, rare even then, of never working without artistic control. His apprenticeship saw him teamed with Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle at Arbuckle’s studio, and Arbuckle always functioned more as friend and collaborator than as boss. Keaton formed his own company in 1920 and, making films his way, quickly became one of the most important comic artists of his time. Perhaps he was naive, but it just didn’t occur to him that this wouldn’t continue at MGM. And he certainly couldn’t foresee that in five short years with the company he would find his career in ruins.

MGM had a way of working. Actors were actors and not creators. The studio would provide the scripts. The actors would perform them, word for word, and collect their paychecks. Buster liked their first idea, for him to play a newsreel cameraman, but beseeched executive Irving Thalberg to throw out their script and let him reinvent it. Thalberg ultimately agreed. The result, The Cameraman, made largely Keaton’s way, was a critical and commercial hit, and so for his next film, MGM, in its infinite wisdom, decided to give him less control.

The story idea for Spite Marriage was Buster’s. But MGM would disperse Keaton’s creative team and provide a script and a humorless producer named Larry Weingarten. It could have been a disaster, but Spite Marriage is a small miracle. Under the most trying circumstances, Keaton created one more genuinely funny movie.

The next night, Buster is drafted to replace a stage extra in the show (don’t overthink this). The sequence begins with an especially funny scene in which Buster, unskilled in the art of applying stage whiskers, slowly turns his face into something resembling a nest made by a cross-eyed bird. Onstage, his bumblings bring down the set and then the house.

But later by the stage door, Trilby, still obsessing over Benmore’s lack of interest, seizes Buster and, to spite Lionel, asks him to marry her (hence the title, geddit?). A dazed Buster agrees.

“Celebrating” after the wedding, Buster and Trilby go nightclubbing. She spots Benmore and companion at the next table and decides to show them how happy she is by downing all the champagne she can get her hands on.

Buster brings the soused bride back to their hotel room, leading to the most famous scene in the film. He wants to put Trilby to bed, but inebriation has reduced her body consistency to something resembling pudding in a sack. The task of lifting her and depositing her sounds easy, but it turns out to be anything but. Buster approaches this as a geometric problem—how to place right angle A (woman) into rectangle B (bed). It’s pure Keaton and unforgettable, and all you need to know about producer Larry Weingarten is that he hated it and wanted to cut it. Fortunately for all of us, this was a battle Keaton won.

The next sequence builds into an un-Keaton but very MGM-ish moment of pure pathos. It’s the next day, and Trilby’s manager is seen convincing her that the marriage was a mistake that will ruin her career if she doesn’t end it. The manager catches Buster returning to the room with the gift of a stuffed dog with a painted tear under its eye. He tells Buster that Trilby is divorcing him, and devastated Buster drops the dog and leaves. The cut to a close-up of the woeful dog seems unimaginable in any previous Keaton movie. Thankfully, this moment is brief. Outside the hotel, Buster runs into Benmore, who informs him that Trilby loved him and not Buster. Suddenly, Buster hauls off and socks him. It’s not the best motivated punch in movie history, but we don’t have long to think about it because Buster quickly walks away and then begins to run. The Keaton run, so specifically his, brings a new momentum to Spite Marriage. In short order, he will find himself in a cab shared by a gangster in a shoot-out with police, in the ocean, in a boat full of rum runners, in the ocean again, and finally in a yacht that carries—surprise—Trilby and Benmore!

This was Keaton’s last personal comedy, so there’s a nice symmetry to these scenes. From his early short The Boat to the features The Navigator and Steamboat Bill Jr., his last independent film, boats had always been important to Buster. In Spite Marriage, when a fire breaks out on the yacht, everyone, including the cowardly Benmore, flees the ship, leaving it to Buster and Trilby alone, which echoes the plot of The Navigator.

From the dawn of his career, Buster played a man buffeted by the winds of fate. Thrown into mystifying and dangerous situations, he must orient himself and bring out his inner strength to prevail. And so now, donning the Captain’s hat, Buster takes charge and Trilby, seeing the new man, softens.

Finally, the rum runners board the yacht and try to take over. Trilby joins Buster in a monumental fight to save the ship. This leads to what might be the last spectacular stunt gag of Keaton’s career. In a single shot (at Keaton’s insistence), Buster is chased to the bow of the yacht and forced to leap in the water. The waves sweep him all along the hull until he reaches a rowboat tied to the stern and pulls himself into it, enabling him to climb back on the ship and defeat the villains.

The hero and the lady return to shore, and the film ends with Trilby telling Buster, “You’re going to see a lot of me from now on”—a happy ending, at least if you don’t stop to think that the woman has been nice for approximately five percent of the film.

So ends a thoroughly entertaining movie, a notch or two down from his best but still a pleasure. But how much is pure Keaton? Let’s go back a bit. Remember that moment when Buster leaped into the car with the gangster, triggering the rest of the film? Well, the whole gangster subplot came from the studio, and Keaton didn’t want it. He felt it was overcomplicated, and he preferred a simpler story. But he lost that battle. And yes, if you take a step back you can see his point. Knowing that, we can now see that everything in the film from that moment on was a compromise. But if you watch Spite Marriage without this knowledge it won’t cross your mind. You’ll be having too much fun.

So what saved Spite Marriage? What appears to have happened is that Keaton took the studio framework and filled every nook and cranny of it with gags and ideas to keep it alive and funny. He may have been aided in this by director Edward Sedgwick. Sedgwick had been the assigned director on The Cameraman and had quickly learned that the easiest and fastest way to direct Buster Keaton was to stand back and let him get on with it. The truce made them an effective team on that film, and it seems likely they carried that process on to Spite Marriage.

Spite Marriage was very well received by critics and audiences, but the war that Buster had to wage to get it as good as it is may have unfairly damaged its reputation to the point that it is often sidelined today. The wistful feeling one gets watching this film is due to the fact that it marked the end of an era but that you can see a way that Keaton and MGM could have found a middle ground, a compromise that might have worked to some degree of mutual satisfaction. Let MGM give Buster the frameworks, and let him create the comedy within those frameworks. We might never have seen another Our Hospitality, but we might have seen a few more Spite Marriages and even a Cameraman or two.

But it was not to be. With the coming of sound, the gates slammed shut and the cuffs went on. Keaton would be forced to perform unfunny scripts with flat dialogue and no space to work his physical magic. Although the films were commercial hits, the studio, tired of dealing with the unhappy star, dropped him in 1933.

Listen, it’s been more than ninety years since Buster Keaton smashed into the MGM Studios wall, the one wall he couldn’t climb over, and those of us who love and revere him are still furious about it. What was the point? Why hire Buster Keaton if you don’t want “Buster Keaton”? Who commissions a portrait by Da Vinci and then takes away his paints and brushes? The arrogance of the studio system—the idea that the corporate “they” knew better than the talent they employed—just rolled over Keaton as it did to too many unique artists.

There were dark days ahead for Buster, but just as his characters arrived at their hard-fought happy endings, so did Buster in life. By the fifties and sixties, he was in constant demand for TV, film, and stage. He lived long enough to see the revival of interest in his classic films and received ovations at international festivals. His private life blossomed, too, when in 1940 he married Eleanor Norris, a happy union that would last the rest of his life. Not only did she support and promote him, she performed with him around the world. One sketch that was a highlight of their act: “Putting the Wife to Bed” from Spite Marriage.

Keaton at the Crossroads: Buster’s Last Silent Comedy, Spite Marriage

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