Jeff (Reginald Denny) desperately wants to marry Virginia (Sally
Eilers), but she refuses to marry him until her sister is married off
first ... but the sister, Angelica (Dorothy Christy) is a bit pciky, &
she wants a man she can never be sure about & who is full of adventure
... So it seems like a stroke of luck that Jeff accidently runs over
Reggie (Buster Keaton), a sign tacker (he works in the advertising
industry), who is neither full of adventure nor a man with many affairs,
but he's unconscious, so he doesn't know yet ... Jeff sells off Reggie
to Angelica as a pure-bred Casanova, & even pays women to claim they
have abn affair with him & buys articles in society columns to
chronicle Reggie's wild life. It all goes well for a while, but
eventually, overhearing a conversation between Reggie & Leila (Natalie
Moorhead), the woman he allegedly had an affair with, Angelica finds out
that Reggie is actually tanme as a kitten ... & thus of no interest at
all - the wedding is cancelled only a few days before its set date ... Now
Jeff knows only one solution, Angelica has to catch Reggie red-handed with
another woman - which might be a bit of a problem because Reggie is a very
shy guy. so Jeff hires his old friend Polly (Charlotte Greenwood) to play
Reggie's mistress. Unfortunately though Jeff doesn't tell Reggie every
detail of his plan, so Reggie elopes with the wrong woman, Nita (Joan
Peers), who has just had a fight with her husband Fred (Walter Merrill)
& is now keen to do something wild ... but not too wild, Regie finds
out when the two are in a hotelroom together & he tries to go through
with the program suggested to him by Jeff. Then Polly shows up, &
even though he started without her, she gives Reggie some valuable
pointers of what to do when alone in a hotelroom with a woman ... which
pretty much primes Reggie, & from now on he tries to passionately kiss
every woman who enters the room ... & there are quite a lot of those. Then
Fred, Nita's hubby joins the party too, & he has a gun that goes boom
awfully quick, & to get out of an embarrassing situation, Polly plays
dead ... which makes the situation even more embarrassing when the police
shows up & it all ends in a extended chase scene, before Reggie
finally gets the girl ... Angelica, in case you wondered. Parlor,
Bedroom and Bath was based on a then quite popular play & is
essentially a romantic comedy - a genre with which slapstick genius Buster
Keaton doesn't fit in quite as well as he should, as it does rely heavily
on dialogue rather than on physical comedy. Furthermore, Keaton's
alcoholism had by the time his was made reached its peak, & sometimes
during the movie he has visible difficulties delivering his lines
(on the other hand his slapstick timing is as flawless as ever) ... this
is not to say that Parlor, Bedroom and Bath is essentially a bad
movie, only a rather forgettable one compared to Keaton's very rich
filmography. Charlotte Greenwood's performance is outstanding though,
& she easily dominates every scene she's in, even opposite Keaton.
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