The great stone face went from a series of amusing second rate comedy features at MGM to a series of flawed but amusing comedy shorts at a poverty tow studio known as Educational. In this one, he's a clumsy rich guy who "vants to be alone", and ends up in a ghost town where a ghostly gunfight takes place every night. There's the typical Keaton slapstick, utilizing every day props in ingenious ways. Among the non-dead humans he encounters is wannabe miner Warren Hymee who helps him strike gold as he pursues his unsuccessful desire to be alone. Dorothy Dix plays the girlfriend he's running away from. Keaton brings this up a notch, but other than him, there's not much else to recommend.

Gold Ghost, The (1934) ** (out of 4) Wally (Buster Keaton) is expected to marry Gloria (Dorothy Dix) but she finds him to be a wimp and refuses his hand. Wally, depressed, decides to drive out West where he ends up in a ghost town in Nevada where he pretends to be the sheriff but ends up with the job just in time as a gangster comes to visit as well as some looking for gold. After Keaton's contract was destroyed by MGM he moved over to Educational Pictures and this was the first film he made for the ultra low-budget studio. I've heard many reviewers say this was the best of the group and if that's true then I'm really not looking forward to the future films. As many other reviewers have stated, the first portion of this movie features a long silent sequence and many fans seem to feel this was a great return for Keaton. However, in my opinion, just because you make something silent doesn't mean that the quality of the work is any higher. I really thought many of the jokes fell flat on their face simply because of how straight many of them were. The majority of the silent segment features Keaton falling over things. He goes to sit in a chair but it breaks and he falls. Keaton goes to lean against a table but it collapses and he falls. He puts his foot on a bar and, you guessed it, he falls. There are a couple funny gags later on in the film including the best one where Keaton is washing his clothes and is somewhat nude when all these cars start pulling up and he must frantically run off. Another nice gag is when he and the gangster are playing cards on a desk full of dust that goes wild each time one of them moves. THE GOLD GHOST isn't a horrible film because it did at least keep me mildly entertained but at the same time there simply weren't enough laughs to call it a winner.

Well, maybe Fool's Gold... No it's not "vintage" Keaton, but it's pretty dang good! Educational Pictures gets slammed all the time for being so low-budget, but here is a whole broken-down frontier's town for Buster to play with, complete with ghosts, mobsters, and a dang hell of a lot of extras! It's a quickie-film, as if Buster were trying out sound for the first time to see what he could do, and on a very smallish experimental level I think it works pretty good. Of the entire 16 Educational shorts he made, my vote for best of the bunch is "The Chemist". ("Grand Slam" has been over-rated for years, and doesn't come close, in my opinion.) Buy the set from Kino and check these out for yourself!

"The Gold Ghost" isn't the best of Keaton's sound-era shorts (that would be "Grand Slam Opera") but it's well above average for this grim period in his career.Buster and a motley group of people end up out West in an old mining town. The gold mine has long since been tapped out, and the town is deserted ... a "ghost town" in the figurative sense, but also a ghost town literally when Buster has a brief encounter with the ghost of a saloon-girl. (This movie really has nothing to do with spooks.)Buster appoints himself sheriff, but then he has to deal with a crook on the lam, played by Warren Hymer. Hymer is one of my favourite supporting actors. He had an extremely narrow range -- he nearly always played dim-witted crooks -- but he never failed to give a funny performance, and he's quite good in this film.Watch out in "The Gold Ghost" for an actor named Joe Young, who looks and sounds exactly like ROBERT Young (of "Father Knows Best") hiding behind a moustache. Film historian David Shipman has written that this actor *is* Robert Young, using an alias. That's not true: the actor Joe Young in this film is Robert Young's lookalike brother, a movie-star wanna-be who had to grow a moustache in order to look different from his brother and have any sort of acting career at all. I'll give "The Gold Ghost" 7 out of 10 ... and two of those points are for Warren Hymer's deft performance.