Keep Smiling (1928) User Reviews

Not a film likely to turn anyone into an Aubrey-phile!

[planktonrules · 5/10 · 6 February 2019]

This film from the Weiss Brothers stars Jimmie Aubrey--a small-time film comic who has pretty much been forgotten today. And, based on what I just saw, he can stay forgotten. Now it isn't that it's a bad film....but it certainly wasn't a very good one either.

When the story begins, Jimmie learns that his landlady has taken all his clothes because he didn't pay the rent. After making up a homemade outfit (complete with a stolen hat), he leaves in search of food and makes his way to a lunch counter. But with no money, he's bound to get in trouble. But it gets worse...the idiot owner takes a liking to Jimmie and leaves him to run the place...with disastrous results.

This film is unusual in that is DOES have a pie fight and despite the stereotype, very few silent movies ever featured one of these. But that's not enough to take a mediocre script and a less than lovable comic and make it memorable.

Do Something Funny

[boblipton · 5/10 · 3 February 2014]

The Weiss Brothers owned a small chain of movie theaters and got into production. It was a model of business expansion that had worked before, but they were a bit too late to become major players. They remained Poverty Row producers and gave up some time in the 1930s.

In the 1920s they tried several comedy short subject series, usually with stars who had lost their contracts with better financed studios. Jimmy Aubrey, the star of this film, had never been a top-ranked star, but he was a competent one. The trouble is that he never developed a personality that the audience cared about and his gag construction was never more than average. In this one he spends the first reel trying to mooch money because he is too lazy to work. In the second, he winds up running a lunch counter and gets involved in a sporadic pie fight. One sequence is built pretty much like one in Chaplin's THE IMMIGRANT more than a decade before, while the others look and times like burlesque routines.

That is phrased too strongly. For the obviously tiny budget, KEEP SMILING works its jokes well and times its gags at a good clip. It is simply that Aubrey never makes anything his own. That makes this just another of the innumerable forgettable short comedies of the 1920s.