What! No Beer?

Buster's Swan Song
What! No Beer? plots Keaton and Durante trying out a beer selling biz starting the day after beer is voted legalized following prohibition. Figuring that the masses will be starved for legalized beer after waiting 13 years, these guys would be the first to sell it again and become millionaires overnight. They get involved with 2 bootleggers who are paranoid about losing their shirts because of the new legislation and a mess involving gangsters and bullets continues throughout the picture. Buster plays his typical babe-in-the-woods character, Elmer.

The old brewery they use looks like a grounded UFO in an Area 51 room. I kept expecting Ming the Merciless to creep out the hatch. Instead the boys are overwhelmed by near-beer suds that flood the room in a pretty good choatic scene that's one of the highlights of the picture.

What! No Beer? was filmed during the worst period of Buster's life, mainly because of his battle with alcoholism. The problem is obvious in a few...

A Mild Farce with Droll Characters
The film image is very good. It is clear, with a broad range of graytones, the details of the image is good, and the sound is good (it is 1933, remember). It seems amazing such a film has been so well preserved. They did not go back to the negative to do any scratch-removal treatment, so there is some white dust floating around, but I didn't really notice it much except during fade-outs. So, four and a half stars for the quality of the film on the dvd. The movie itself is a different matter... More like 3 stars, for an overall 4-star rating:

I did not originally look at this film as a "Keaton" film, so I did not experience the deep disappointment expressed by some writers about this film. Rather, I sought this out as a Jimmy Durante movie. Some of us LIKE Jimmy Durante. He isn't a stuntmeister and he isn't much of a dancer, but his energy and timing are exceptional, and his ability to suddenly flail about then stop abruptly is pantomimic. I love his cartoonish...

Keaton, Durante, and lots of beer
Reunited with co-star Jimmy Durante and comedy director Edward Sedgwick, "What! No Beer?" was really not a bad picture for the great Buster Keaton to exit on at MGM. Playing yet another "Elmer" (MGM must've thought Keaton looked like an Elmer), Keaton is a taxidermist who gets talked into investing in a brewery & thus, being first in line to satisfy the demand once Prohibition ends by his barber friend (Durante). But their manufacturing of "real beer" jumps the gun, and they first run afoul of the law, then get caught in the middle of a gang war struggle to take over their brewery. There's some side silliness when Keaton becomes infatuated with one of the gangster's moll. For whatever reason, Durante is particularly loud & annoying in this picture, his rantings making you appreciate the measured subtlety of Keaton, who takes some of the most spectacular pratfalls that most comics wouldn't do on a pile of marshmallows.
WNB is at least as frothy & fun as the brew it creates. The...

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