That's excellent news... I'll buy the package just for the first two films. "The Cameraman" and "Spite Marriage" are the final two of Buster's great silent features, and the last films he had real creative control over.
The sound films he made for MGM— well, they have their moments, but not all that many. The dumbest thing they did was to put together the artificial "team" of Keaton and Durante, which didn't make any sense, and the pictures do stink.
On paper, it probably looked good: a guy who never speaks, and a guy who can't shut up (sort of like Harpo and Groucho). But the pictures don't work at all, and Buster
is clearly drunk in a lot of the scenes. MGM would have made a better choice if they'd paired Buster with Cliff Edwards— since they wanted to make him half of a team— and Buster and Cliff had a natural chemistry together (unlike Buster and Jimmy).
Still, I can't help but wonder if Keaton would still have done well in his later career if he'd had to accept equal billing with
anyone. He
knew what kind of talent he had, and after he left Fatty Arbuckle's film company, basically everyone else who appeared in his films played second banana (especially the leading ladies, who often get thrown around like sacks of bananas... or potatoes).
Buster just wasn't born to be a co-star, that's all.
