In the early days of talkies, many Hollywood films were remade in foreign languages for audiences overseas. Most often, as with Universal Pictures' Spanish version of Dracula, the producers would recast with an entirely new set of actors. A handful of stars were bilingual, and were able to repeat their roles in French (like Jeanette MacDonald) or German (like Greta Garbo). But in some instances, comedies were handled differently. Star comedians delivered their lines phonetically; apparently, the idea was that even if they spoke other languages poorly, the effect would be funny in itself. Comics who appeared in these alternate versions included Laurel & Hardy, Charley Chase, Harry Langdon, and Buster Keaton.
Keaton's first feature for MGM, Free and Easy, was remade in Spanish with Keaton repeating his role of Elmer Butts, and was retitled Estrellados. I've seen the English language version twice over the years, and share the widely-held opinion that it's among the weakest of Keaton's MGM features. (A couple of the later ones aren't so bad.) Here's where Buster lost control of his output. What little entertainment value Free and Easy has comes, first, in the glimpses we're afforded of the MGM studio and its personnel in the early talkie days, and second, in the musical number featuring Buster during the finale. Otherwise, we're stuck with long stretches of dull dialog, delivered by unappealing characters. In one sequence Buster gets chased around the MGM lot by a security guard, but the laughs are sparse. Even so, I was curious about the Spanish language version. For one thing, I wondered if Buster performed any pantomime bits not found in the more familiar version. I was also curious about how the 'star cameos' were handled.
Unfortunately, Estrellados follows the original all too closely. Buster has no alternate gags, with only a couple of minor exceptions. In the movie premiere sequence, during a car-parking routine, his hat flies off and he has to go fetch it, but there's no payoff. It's not a huge improvement. Otherwise, Elmer -- here known as "Canuto" -- doggedly recites all that witless dialog in what sounds like halting Spanish. Most of his fellow players, recast for this version, speak the language fluently; Don Alvarado takes the Robert Montgomery role as the caddish movie star, and Raquel Torres (best remembered from Duck Soup with the Marx Brothers) is the sweet, naïve, bland leading lady, in place of Anita Page. You also get a glimpse of Carlos Villarías, better known as the Spanish-speaking Count Dracula, who acts as master of ceremonies at the movie premiere.
But the celebrities who make brief appearances were not compelled to speak phonetic Spanish. When Jackie Coogan arrives at the premiere, and is asked to say a few words to radio listeners, he opens his mouth -- and we hear a boy deliver his lines in fluent Spanish. Coogan is dubbed, with little effort to match the words to his lips. Something similar happens later on the MGM lot, where Cecil B. DeMille and Fred Niblo discuss casting. The men turn away from the camera slightly to speak, as other actors deliver their lines in Spanish. It happens again when we see Lionel Barrymore directing a scene; he's dubbed by someone who sounds nothing like Lionel. And so it goes, except for the sequence with Karl Dane and Dorothy Sebastian, who perform a scene in a cave in the English language version; this was cut entirely from Estrellados, for unknown reasons.
Eventually we get to that finale, the filming of a bizarre operetta. (It resembles the clunky studio musicals in production at the time; no wonder they fell out of favor so quickly before Busby Berkeley came along.) At long last Buster is permitted some action. He performs a lively slapstick number with Trixie Friganza -- who no longer plays his mother-in-law in this version, but was retained for this sequence -- and a lovely bit as a dancing marionette, a number that also symbolically represents his position at MGM. The song "Free and Easy" is mostly cut, except for the chorus. And we're still stuck with that mawkish ending, when it finally dawns on our hapless hero that the girl of his dreams loves someone else. Then it's over. Estrellados supposedly runs 96 minutes, but it sure does feel longer than that.
