What! No Beer?

Buster Keaton signed a contract with MGM near the end of the silent era, and it proved to be a disaster in many ways. Part of that was his own fault, as he was in a failed marriage and started to drink even more heavily. But it didn't help that MGM's creative control didn't mesh well with Keaton's style of humor and moviemaking. To see how badly things went wrong, one can watch a movie like What! No Beer?.

Keaton plays a taxidermist, Elmer Butts. It's presumably late 1932, as there's an election coming up and one of the key issues is whether the keep the state "dry", which of course means in the sense of alcohol. Presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt had as one of his campaign planks repealing the 18th Amendment. Elmer doesn't seem particularly political, attending a "dry" rally only because a woman he'd like to pursue is going. Not so Elmer's good friend, the barber Jimmy Potts (Jimmy Durante). He's a committed wet, and since Elmer is apolitical, it doesn't take too much to convince Elmer to vote wet.

The wets win the election, although with the 18th Amendment still not officially repealed -- that would take another year -- it's not yet legal to produce and distribute alcohol. Not that Jimmy cares. He has an idea of buying a former brewery that had to close with the onset of Prohibition, and start making beer again, not that he knows anything about beer brewing. He also needs seed money, which he doesn't have. Ah, but Elmer does have it. Not that Elmer has a strong desire to go into the brewery business, but he wants to make enough money so that the woman from that dry rally will respect him and marry him.

Meanwhile, the bootleggers who have been producing illicit alcohol are none too happy with the new upstarts. Butch (John Miljan) happens to be the boyfriend of that woman Elmer dreams about, and is also one of the bootleggers. He meets with his nominal rival Spike (Edward Brophy) to figure out how to handle this new supply of beer that Jimmy is putting out.

That's the basic gist of What! No Beer?, and that's as far as it goes before falling off the rails. To me, there were a whole lot of problems. The first is that Durante and Keaton don't really mesh, and that's something MGM should have seen having made two earlier movies with the two in the cast (although apparently not working quite so closely as they did here). And then there are Keaton's gags, which are stale, with a beer keg scene that felt like it was a total rip-off of Seven Chances. The plot doesn't really work, either.

It's a shame that Buster Keaton would hit such lows in his career. He really deserved much beter from MGM.