Buster Keaton disappeared during production and married his "sobriety nurse" Mae Scriven during a drunken fling in Mexico.
Buster Keaton's final film for MGM and his last starring role in the U.S. He would go on to make numerous shorts, appear on television, as well as perform as a character in other films.
The unusual, large employee time clock in the brewery was made by the International Time Recording Company (which became IBM in 1929) circa 1910-12. It came in different models to accommodate up to 150 employees. It was a spring-driven clock with a huge cast iron wheel. The rim of the wheel was perforated with numbered holes. Each employee would rotate the pointer to their assigned number and press in. The machine would then record the time on a printed form and ring a bell. A two-colored ribbon printed "regular time" in green and all early, late and overtime in red. One of these units is on exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.
Most contemporary promotional items, reviews, and news items punctuate the film's title as "What! No Beer?", but the on-screen title is punctuated as "What-No Beer?".
During her interview with Dave Davies on the National Public Radio program "Fresh Air," Buster Keaton biographer Dana Stevens named this movie as the possible nadir of the MGM stage of Keaton's career: "What! No Beer? ... is maybe his very most painful film to watch at MGM because it was toward the end. It was, in fact, the last film he made with them as their star comedian. And by that time, he really was deep into depression, alcoholism. You know, he just had a very painful divorce. He was just in an absolutely chaotic and miserable time of his life, and it 100% shows up onscreen. And it's just awful to see him, you know, seeming so miserable, especially because this character that he had always played, which, as you said, was a resourceful, plucky--you know, someone who was put upon by the world and always getting out of disastrous situations but who had a lot of resources to do so, of inner resources.... And during this period at MGM, somehow his--you know, his passivity, the passivity of his character, that kind of essential quiet that he always had in his silent films gets misinterpreted as, you know, masochism almost. And those MGM movies really involve a lot of - some things that hark back to the Joe Keaton-Buster Keaton act in that they're violent but not in that they're funny. You know, so there's a lot of scenes of him kind of being manhandled by bigger characters, being thrown around, having no power. He doesn't get the girl anymore. He's kind of the outcast, almost. Or, you know, he's sort of the loser in some of these movies. And it doesn't suit his character at all. It doesn't suit his sense of humor. And I feel like at MGM, they just never really figured out who he was. You know, they couldn't figure out what kind of vehicles to buy for him, what kind of material to put him in and - or the simple fact that, you know, there are some performers that, if you give them their freedom, they'll do all sorts of incredible things. And if you take away their freedom, they're an animal in a cage. And that, I think, is how he felt and how he seemed in his films while he was at MGM. So his drinking, which had already been, you know, something that ran in the family - his father was an alcoholic. His mother seems to have been drunk almost every day, like, sat and played cards and drank bourbon every day. And he came from that culture. But it really intensified after his marriage started to fall apart, after his job satisfaction went to--down to zero and, you know, during those miserable years. As a result, he was fired from MGM by Louis B. Mayer in 1933 and had a couple of years really on the skids, where he had a lot of trouble finding work. He did not have his drinking under control. At one point, he married his sobriety nurse, the woman who had been hired to look after him and make sure he didn't get drunk. And they spent a couple of seemingly miserable years together. And that was a very dark time in his life."