Sidewalks of New York (1931)

SIDEWALKS OF NEW YORK  (1931)  ¢ ¢
    D: Zion Myers, Jules White
    Buster Keaton, Anita Page, Cliff Edwards,
    Frank Rowan, Clark Marshall, Norman Phillips Jr.
Buster Keaton plays a landlord who takes on a gang of street kids in what turned out to be his most profitable movie at MGM. There are flashes of the old Buster in some of the physical gags - nobody could do a fall like Keaton - but there's not much going on otherwise, which makes the picture's commercial success ironic. Keaton was miserable working on it and thought the movie was terrible, and some critics agree. The directors, Zion Myers and Jules White, were the auteurs behind the "Dogville" movies, a series of short comedies in which all the parts were played by talking dogs. For them, a film like this was a step up. No wonder Buster hated working at MGM.