Malec forgeron

I would rate this below-par for a Buster Keaton short. It's not bad, just not quite up to Buster's wild and craziness he usually exhibits in these short 20-minute films. He set high standards.

Instead of amazing physical feats or a bunch of chase scenes, most of the jokes are either Buster getting a horse dirty or breaking something or someone else doing it, or a nutty invention for a "shock absorber" for riding a horse. They are all mildly amusing, but that's it.

Perhaps part of the problem is that most of the movie takes place in a blacksmith shop/automobile garage. Keaton, with his athletic prowess, needs room to maneuver, and he doesn't have it here.

This is an excellent short comedy with a lot of creative material and a good variety of gags. The setting, with Buster as a blacksmith's assistant, lends itself to a lot of good laughs. Buster is very funny in his approach to helping out various horse-owners, and then it gets even funnier when he tries his hand at repairing cars. There's not really much of a plot, but there's a lot of good material that keeps on coming, and it's good fun right up to the very clever last shot.

This 1922 short subject for First National Pictures finds Buster Keaton as the assistant to blacksmith Joe Roberts. Although by 1922 the horseless carriage had taken over the big city, you could still find a shop like this one in the hinterlands.

In fact Keaton does seek to keep up with the times and also tries to repair a car with hilarious results though not for the car owner.

Best gag in the film was the giant horseshoe over the shop which acts as a magnet grabbing everything metallic near it.

If blacksmith's like Buster were the future of the trade good thing the automobile was invented when it was.

A simple story. A great effect. A lovely comedy, in which not exactly the story is significant but the amazing inventivity. A nice short film, proposing an apprentice and his hilarious mistakes and a love story among horses and cars.

A young blacksmith's apprentice, through the usual in luck and malfunctioning gadgetry, ends up with control of the works for a while. There he tries to make do with all he's learned and what he has, including clever little jokes like horse's shoes in shoeboxes, a watch that needs to be fixed by fire, and a horse-back shock absorber. However, despite his genuine attempts at making everyone happy, eventually all of the customers grow irate, putting the young blacksmith-to-be in danger.

Typical Keaton in its inventiveness, this one has not much to make it stand out from any of his other works except for the delightful destruction of a high-class care, a neat little subversive poke towards conspicuous consumption sentiments. Otherwise, pick a plot line from any other Keaton short, make it revolve around a blacksmith's shop, and you got this neat little fun-fest.

--PolarisDiB