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The exquisite comic mode is a Picabia acceleration, among the admirers is Fellini in La Città delle donne. Before the chase, stillness: Buster Keaton shyly courts his beloved (Ruth Dwyer) through the seasons in a string of postcard compositions, tinted in early Technicolor and framed by the fence that will be dismantled during the climax. The failing firm is rescued by an inheritance, $7 million with the proviso that the young man marries by 7 p.m. on his 27th birthday, which is the same day he gets the news. He asks for the maiden's hand while checking his pocket watch, she learns of the fortune and kicks him out, the rest is a race to the altar. The club teems with potential candidates, one receives the proposal note in the balcony (ripped pieces rain down from the top of the screen) and another turns out to be Lolita in mommy's clothes, the hatcheck girl shakes her head just as Buster opens his mouth. "Who bats next?" The clockmaker who can't tell time, the hairdresser mannequin who loses its head. Dejected in the empty church, the groom dozes off in the front pew while a newspaper article summons forth wave upon wave of women in bridal veils, the hall fills up like the jungle gym in The Birds. ("In case two show up, I'll marry the other one," assures the lawyer.) The mass of female wrath stampeding through Los Angeles is a sight to behold—it hijacks trolleys, decimates walls for hurling bricks, and is surrealistically transformed into an avalanche of bouncing boulders. Running ahead of it is Keaton, leaping off cliffs and emerging from a pond with a turtle dangling from his tie. The note of Char ("La lumière du rocher abrite un arbre majeur...") is picked up by Altman's Dr. T. and the Women. With T. Roy Barnes, Snitz Edwards, and Constance Talmadge. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |