The Passionate Plumber

 (1932)
Directed by Edward Sedgwick
Written by Laurence E. Johnson (screenplay), Ralph Spence (dialog)
Starring Buster Keaton, Jimmy Durante, Irene Purcell, Gilbert Roland, Mona Maris, Polly Moran
IMDB Entry

After the success of The Sidewalks of New York, MGM decided they knew better than Buster Keaton and treated him even more like a contract player. They came up with the idea of pairing him with Jimmy Durante. The first movie with this was The Passionate Plumber.

Elmer* Tuttle (Buster Keaton) is a plumber and inventor living in Paris, friends with cab driver Julius J. McCracken (Jimmy Durante). Patricia Alden (Irene Purcell) is a wealthy American who is having an affair with Tony Lagorce (Gilbert Roland), who is simultaneously wooing Nina Estrada (Polly Moran). Patricia wants to make Tony jealous, so she pretends to be in love with Elmer, who believes she means it. Her off-again, on-again romantic gestures toward Elmer leads him to believe the sentiment is reciprocated.

I had always thought the pairing of Keaton and Durante was a bad idea. Durante is a strong presence and bravura performer, while Keaton is laid back and quiet. But it was better than I expected. Keaton tended to be an innocent and Durante's brashness does mesh in that respect. But Durante is a supporting character -- he vanishes for large parts of the movie. I suspect this was partly a tryout to see if they could work together. Since his screen time is limited, and there are only a few scenes where he appears with Keaton, the combination is adequate, but not great.**

There are some decent comic sequences, all featuring Keaton. There's an attempted duel between him and Tony, and a scene in the casino where the naive Keaton never really catches on to how gambling works.  

You can also see the pre-code credentials in the basic story and in the scene when Keaton emerges from the bathroom in just a towel after his clothes are soaked. Tony challenges him to a duel by slapping Elmer's face with a glove.  Elmer removes the towel to slap Tony with it; Patricia screams.

Gilbert Roland had a very long career as a character actor, and is probably best known from the movie versions of The Cisco Kid.

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*Keaton was fond of the name Elmer, using it almost twenty times in his movies, 

**As an aside, at one point Durante refers to the French national anthem as "The Mayonnaise." This was an ancient joke at the time. When Alexander Woolcott wrote his review of the Marx Brothers' "I'll Say She Is" on Broadway in 1924 (a rave, but not a great review, since he talks more about himself than he does the Marxes), he says "it was in a music hall in Omaha in 1904 that a French scene was last played without someone referring to that inspiring anthem The Mayonnaise." Some hyperbole, but obviously a very old joke.