La maison démontable de Malec

One Week and The Scarecrow are the only two silent films that I can watch over and over and over and laugh like a maniac each time I see them. I have seen hundreds of silent films and seen hundreds of performances, but there is no performer, past or present, who was as versatile, good-looking, and out and out funny as Buster Keaton. He is the king to which all comedians should aspire and he leaves Chaplin thousands of miles behind in terms of comedy. Personally, I can't watch Chaplin without being all too aware that I'm supposed to be in a music hall. Keaton, however, isn't hindered by his vaudeville roots and can make a laugh-out-loud domestic comedy using vaudeville tricks without making it seem like a recreation of a vaudeville routine.

A house. Not assembled. A young couple. And a week. One of the most seductive films of Buster Keaton. For imagination, for the feel to see an animation, for lovely-dramatic story - the storm has a lead role- for the end and for the trait of genius. Something sad - magic defines this short film. One of the lovely ones for its humor and for the beautiful way for explore the force of details.

An early Buster Keaton short which still has an enormous amount of charm all these years later, and which has plenty of laughs throughout its running time.

First there's a wedding, and the newlyweds almost don't make it to their wedding night; and then there is the portable house they have to start from scratch! Of course this means the house looks wrong, it falls down, lots of stunts and scenes are set up to make the audience gasp and chuckle, and so on.

'One Week' is a really fun film and one which is timeless. Keaton would make many more shorts and his great feature-length movies were yet to come, but this is charming snapshot of what was to come.

Buster gets married, and as a wedding present his uncle gives him and his new bride some land and a house to go with it, but only when they get to the lot do they realised that the house is not yet assembled!

The framing device of the week both gives Keaton the opportunity to devise seven comic episodes, and also gives the whole piece a wonderful unity. I rank this alongside The Boat (1921) as one of Keaton's best shorts, alongside The Electric House (1922) for the best use of gadgets (in case you didn't know, Keaton trained as an engineer, and so his films are filled with marvellously clever gadgets), and alongside The Scarecrow (1920) for general fun and enjoyment.

For me, this was THE perfect Keaton comedy.

Keaton was now out on his own, no longer working with Fatty Arbuckel. 'One Week'was his first independent film. Joseph Schneck produced the film, having done work on the Fatty and Keaton shorts. The team of Buster Keaton and Eddi Cline directed and did script work as would follow in most of Keaton's other shorts. 'One Week' is definitive of Buster Keaton's style. It is purely gag over narrative. Keaton's performance is more important than the story, and that was pretty much how all his later movies worked. Keaton also enjoyed capturing the world around him as it happened. His stunts in this movie did not rely on editing. The house really did turn, the train sequence was real. This was a good beginning to what followed.