Until the early seventies, Spite Marriage was the least available of Keaton's silent films, and it remains one of the most neglected. The reputation that preceded the film--that it was inferior to its predecessors because it marked a period during which Keaton was not his own master--was reversed with the film's revival. If it is not his best film, it is still so good that, as one reviewer notes, “one doesn't stop to wonder how much better it might have been if Keaton could have made it entirely his own way and with his own team.” Keaton plays a pants presser, Elmer Edgemont, who haunts a Broadway theater for glimpses of his true love, the actress Trilby Drew (Dorothy Sebastian). When her fiancé marries another woman, Drew draws the willing Elmer into a marriage for spite; only on his wedding night does he realize his position as a pawn. Sight and Sound notes that, in Dorothy Sebastian, “Keaton found his most talented foil....” She is especially memorable as an inert and inebriated bride in the famous bedroom scene, in which Keaton's machinations to quite literally get her into bed are ingenious. Another great sequence involves Elmer's stage debut, in which he turns a serious Civil War drama into a vaudevillian comic-disaster. Together with The Cameraman (1928), also directed by Edward Sedgwick, Spite Marriage sustained the critical reputation and the enormous box office draw of Buster Keaton's silents against the onslaught of the talking picture.