Programme notes CH 04 — The Matinee
Free and Easy
A filling-station attendant from Gopher City, Kansas, follows a beauty-contest winner to Hollywood as her manager and is cast by accident.
Keaton’s first talkie is a studio touring the lot and showing off its sound stages, and the trade he made in 1928 is in every frame: no more his own unit, his own gags or his own cut. What survives is the body. He is a hick in a bowler, lost among MGM’s sets, wandering into other people’s pictures. Lionel Barrymore, Cecil B. DeMille and Fred Niblo appear as themselves. Watch the finale, Keaton in an operetta uniform, made up and miserable, dancing in a chorus line because the cameras are rolling; the last thing the film gives him is a close-up, and his face does the rest.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Edward Sedgwick
- Photographed by
- Leonard Smith
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Two years apart, MGM sends a hopeful from the sticks to Hollywood and lets its own stars play themselves. In Show People Marion Davies becomes a star; in Free and Easy Keaton becomes a joke, and the cameo stars line up to watch.