Sidewalks of New York

About twenty years ago, TCM produced a relatively brief documentary titled So Funny It Hurt: Buster Keaton & MGM, which discusses how Keaton's signing a contract with MGM at the end of the silent era more or less derailed his career as MGM terribly stifled Keaton's creativity. If you want to see a sad example of what MGM did to Keaton, try watching Sidewalks of New York.

Keaton plays Homer Van Dine Harmon, and as you might guess from a name like that, he's an idle rich guy. Specifically, one who owns several tenement apartment buildings. So, as the movie opens his assistant Poggle (Cliff Edwards) is down at the tenements to collect the rent, only to get beat up for his trouble by the sort of young hoodlums who a decade later would be played by the Dead End Kids, or maybe the East Side Kids or the Bowery Boys. Homer is going to have to collect the rent himself.

However, Homer's attempt also leads to the same sort of scuffle that Poggle got into previously. It also results in Homer's meeting Margie (Anita Page), who is the adult sister of Clipper, one of the delinquent boys. She's also his guardian, since 100 years ago it wasn't all that uncommon for there to be large age differences between siblings and the parents to die relatively young. In a trope that MGM probably liked but doesn't work for this version of Buster Keaton, Homer immediately falls head over heels for Margie, so Homer wants to do something for Clipper and the rest of the neighborhood boys.

Homer's plan is to take one of the buildings he owns and convert the ground floor into a YMCA-like gymnasium, where the local boys can blow off their steam and possibly get fit in the process too. But Clipper doesn't like Homer from the previous incident of trying to collect rent, and vows not to go to the gym at all, and convince he friends not to go either. Clipper prefers the company of Butch, who is much more of Clipper's social class. The only problem is that Butch is an actual criminal. Worse, Butch decides to bring Clipper into his schemes.

The final scheme is a plot to kill Homer. Homer, as part of his trying to do good deeds for the deprived neighborhood boys, is going to put on a play with the kids playing most of the parts. The plot of the play will have Clipper's character shoot one played by Homer with a prop gun and blanks. When Butch learns about this, he plots to have real bullets put in the gun so it will kill Homer!

Sidewalks of New York is, I'm sorry to say, fairly dire. That I think, is largely down to MGM, as well as to the fact that the movie was released in 1931, well into the sound era. MGM, instead of letting Buster come up with his trademark physical humor, wants a bunch of dialogue-based stuff, which doesn't work at all, as in a terrible courtroom scene. The movie also feels like a bunch of disjointed scenes. It's a shame that Buster Keaton wound up in stuff like this.