Free and Easy (1930)
5/10
Buster Keaton and Anita Page in early sound film trifle...
30 August 2007
BUSTER KEATON and ANITA PAGE are saddled with some lame dialog and tacky situations in this hokey comedy about an aspiring beauty contest winner (Page) who travels to Hollywood with her mother in hope of becoming America's next motion picture sweetheart. It's a look at early Hollywood and for that reason alone it's fairly entertaining.

ROBERT MONTGOMERY is featured as Larry Mitchell, a movie star who takes an interest in Page after a chance meeting on the train to Hollywood. Keaton is his usual bumbling self but the script is a mess with dialog that is painfully unfunny. Nobody can really save the comedy/musical from being way less than ordinary. Keaton with stilted lines is less funny than when he's pantomiming it up in silent films.

Robert Montgomery is dubbed for a couple of awkward musical numbers, all done in the early style of MGM talkies before a word like "finesse" could be assigned to them. The tinny sound recording is no help.

Best excuse for watching is to see how things improved rapidly in the late thirties and forties, but this one has to be regarded as strictly a curiosity piece for fans of Buster Keaton and early sound films.

Painfully unfunny in an amateurish kind of way for a film from MGM. Interesting only for a glimpse of early Hollywood pioneering.
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