This is certainly not a "Buster Keaton" movie per say. This mush of a film is yet another perfect example of when the "front office boys", who have no real talent themselves except how to calculate costs and profits in their tiny minds, mess around and essentially sabotage an otherwise brilliant comedian and his work. Louis B. Mayer, as it is well known, had absolutely no sense of humor or appreciation for others who did. He was a "money man", constantly worried about profit margins and box office returns. Nuts to the genius he had working for him, as the Marx Brothers realized for themselves about six years later when they came to MGM. "Free & Easy" is anything but. It helped to cost Buster his reputation as a creative force and certainly does not appear to have been an easy script for him to endure. He is presented as a buffoon of a man who is merely a doormat for the world. Nothing like his persona in his own artistically controlled shorts and features where he ends up on the plus side of whatever adversity he's faced. Apparently, as with all comedians in this situation, he had a contractual obligation to be filled and he filled it to the best of his ability, even though obviously constrained and repressed from any valuable input. Ironically, the critics at the time actually preferred this type of Buster to his own persona that he had originally created and the box office apparently did too. Who in the world knows why? Chaplin never succumbed to outside pressure and was always on top. So why didn't this work for Keaton? This picture is a travesty of talent wasted on an inane script with poor musical numbers and a juvenile Robert Montgomery. Only watch this out of morbid curiosity and then go back to something like "The General" or "The Cameraman" and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about.
Review of Free and Easy
