Finally, I have seen ALL of 1933’s What! No Beer? starring Jimmy Durante and a sadly demolished Buster Keaton.
How did this gobbler ever look good on paper? We had to choke it down in five-minute segments.
Where to begin? There’s a lot of shouting and stumbling, none of which is in the least bit funny, apart from one or two of Durante’s throwaway lines.
It’s filled with idiotic, contrived, completely avoidable situations, the moronic end brings new meaning to the word ‘cringe,’ and yet, it reportedly made money.
The frenetic material makes The Three Stooges seem quietly dignified; the story makes Plan Nine From Outer Space look like Citizen Kane.
What’s it about? Prohibition’s about to be repealed, and Buster, a taxidermist, teams up with his friend, Durante, to brew beer and become wealthy.
What could possibly go wrong? Yes, thanks for reminding me.
Buster and Jimmy (that’s his name in the film, as though too dispirited to remember a different one) run into gangsters, are arrested by police, and wade through gallons of foam, a gag appropriated from Buster’s much funnier short, My Wife’s Relations (1922). In fact all the gags were appropriated from Buster’s REAL movies, like Seven Chances (1925), only there, they got laughs.
There are one or two meager good points. Ya gotta love blowhard Spike Moran, played by Buster’s old pal Ed Brophy. But most of the cast is as wooden as the barrels the beer’s been canned in.
Somewhere in among all this mess, Buster spots a girl and falls for her. He can still sell his patented yearning look.
Durante works himself into a frenzy, struggling to save this bolus of a feature, but it’s hopeless. There are jagged, jumpy, mis-matched cuts everywhere, and it’s filmed like a static stage play, even while churning around so much, it throws off buckets of flop sweat.
Former dancer Phyllis Barry (who actually did appear with The Three Stooges) plays an unworthy object of Buster’s yearnings: a duplicitous, venal gangster’s moll and bimbo de luxe who turns on a dime for no discernible reason. (Except, of course, that it’s BUSTER. Ya know?)
Worst of all, however, is seeing the master who created such brilliant movies as The General (1926) and my beloved Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928) reduced not only to wallowing in this bilge, but in such a state of inebriation that he either forgets lines, or slurs them when he does remember.
I’d drink too, if I was in this turkey.
Watch if you must, but be well forewarned.
Busterverse: