Hi,
May a newcomer venture a few words? -- partly to say how much I (and, no doubt, many other non-posting readers around the world) value threads like this one, and partly in response to some of Scharpedin's queries.
First, the list of Keaton's various appearances should also include
The Home Owner (1961)
This is a 23-min industrial film discovered in the late 1990s. It's very similar in length, genre, & quality to
Lester Snapwell and
The Scribe; any list that includes them should include it too. I'm sure the MK2 list compiler was simply unaware of its existence. (The title is often spelled
The Homeowner, but
The Home Owner is what the title card on the film itself reads.)
Industrial Strength Keaton collects the following films:
The Playhouse, Parlor Bedroom & Bath, An Old Spanish Custom, The Devil to Pay, The Home Owner, and
The Triumph of Lester Snapwell (plus assorted odds & ends, mainly TV commercials and guest appearances on TV shows). The set is reviewed ,
here and
here, and some screencaps have been posted
here.
As you can see, the set's picture quality is generally first-rate, though its audio quality is less so; in direct comparison with some other DVD releases, I find that the Industrial Strength Keaton has slightly fuzzier, woollier dialogue, plus occasional background rumbles or buzzes without any counterpart in other DVD transfers from exactly the same sources. I know this is a strain for some listeners in P
arlor Bedroom & Bath (a very talky talkie, from a stage play) and
An Old Spanish Custom; I know that other listeners aren't bothered by it at all. Most other items in the set are silent or near-silent and don't pose any such problems; in particular, there are no significant audio problems in
The Home Owner and
Lester Snapwell -- which would be the set's two biggest attractions for most collectors.
Two other small points about the Industrial Strength Keaton set. The feature films aren't divided into chapters, alas (I know that some Keatonians sometimes want to watch the last 10-15 mins of
Parlor Bedroom & Bath without necessarily having to sit through the whole of the previous hour). Moreover, the set's compilers have misidentified Keaton's 1952 Ken Murray Show appearance as his 1957
You Asked For It appearance, and vice versa.
Other 1930s films? Well, eight of the Educational shorts are collected on two DVDs issued by Reelclassicdvd (
www.reelclassicdvd.com), the company behind the recent 3DVD American Slapstick set. Volume 1 has
One Run Elmer, Hayseed Romance, Mixed Magic, and
Love Nest on Wheels; Volume 2 has
Tars and Stripes, Three on a Limb, Grand Slam Opera, and
Blue Blazes. (Note that there's no overlap with Kino's Keaton Plus disc, which offers
Allez Oop and
Jail Bait.) As always with Reelclassicdvd, these are careful, accurate, but unrestored transfers, so you mustn't expect them to look anything like as good as Kino's
Allez Oop and
Jail Bait (in fairness, I'm sure Kino chose those two precisely because exceptionally good source materials were available for them). The source prints are pretty good, but a few frames are missing here and there, as there are in all collections of the Educationals that I've seen in any format. The only significant loss is early in Hayseed Romance, where the Reelclassicdvd source lacks a few seconds of the hero's first encounter with his beloved, including the little joke about the Green house. A shame to lose anything at all, of course; but I imagine most viewers over the age of 6 would relinquish that particular witticism without too many regrets.
Grapevine Video (
www.grapevinevideo.com) offers a DVD-R of
Palooka from Paducah coupled with Speak Easily. Like all copies of
Palooka from Paducah that I've seen, this is in poorish shape -- visually & aurally fuzzy, and significant chunks are missing. The transfer of
Speak Easily is much more tolerable: absolutely complete, and reasonably clear both visually (though it's a little dark) & aurally (though there's a constant soft low-frequency background hum). I don't have the Alpha disc of
Speak Easily, but I suspect the two would be rather similar in quality.
Another Grapevine DVD-R has
Hayseed Romance plus
Parlor Bedroom & Bath. I don't have this disc. No doubt its transfer of the former film isn't as clean as Reelclassicdvd's, and of the latter as Industrial Strength Keaton's; but it might be worth considering if you want its particular coupling.
If you search the internet you'll find a couple of small mail order companies that advertise complete DVD-R sets of Keaton's Educationals. From the information on their websites, it's clear that these have simply been copied from a widely circulated VHS collection; the results couldn't possibly match the Reelclassicdvd transfers, let alone those on Kino's Keaton Plus disc.
The Stolen Jools is on many DVDs of public domain Laurel & Hardy material. No doubt most of the transfers would be horrendous, and incomplete (the little bits of song from “Maurice Chandelierâ€
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