One Week

Buster Keaton had been making films for three years, minus some time he was in the army, but this was his second film independent of his old friend and partner Roscoe Arbuckle. And it has a touch of something unseen in film up to that point - engineering as comedy. In 1920 comedy is just emerging from the pie throwing and pants kicking phase, and Buster is already on a completely different level from his colleagues.

Buster, still a bachelor himself, is shown emerging from a church with his new bride (Sybil Seely). They don't have credited names, for this is not a personal journey for the main characters. The trouble starts immediately with Handy Hank, resentful that the bride turned him down and then chose Buster. Oddly enough this guy is driving them to their destination from the church, and that turns out to be a lot with a portable house deposited on it, both being a wedding gift from Buster's uncle. There they find the house in boxes which they need to assemble themselves in the order of the numbers on the boxes. Handy Hank sees his chance for revenge by changing the numbers on the boxes so that the house will be assembled out of order.

The result is hilarious. The roof is on sideways, the porch is lopsided, there is a door to nowhere on the second floor that leads to the outside, and the rectangular windows have somehow installed to be a trapezoid, which is something that would be impossible just from incorrect installation. The kitchen sink has been installed on the outside of the house, but no problem, Buster has installed it such that it swivels like a revolving door and can thus double as a door and a sink that can be, in bad weather, moved inside. What about the foundation? Well, that becomes a problem later.

I'd highly recommend this as an introduction to Keaton even before you go back and watch his shorts done with Arbuckle and before his later independent efforts. It is much more carefully constructed than poor Buster's house. P. S. - Such portable homes were commonly sold by catalogue in the United States during the first half of the 20th century.

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.

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.

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.

Man, this 19-minute Buster Keaton short is almost too exhausting to watch as one crazy scene after another is shown. This is a wild and always-entertaining short, considered one of Buster's best. It's total lunacy.

Newlywed Buster and his bride (the pretty Sybil Sealey) get a "portable house" as a wedding present. When they get to the site, they find out they have to build the house themselves.

A poor loser who lost the girl, "Handy Hank," sabotages the house-building process by fouling up the numbered directions. When finished, the house is a little strange, to say the least! One look and you are guaranteed to laugh out loud. Anyway, there's work to be done decorating and adding a few more little things like th chimney or trying to fit a piano through a front window.

A calendar is shown throughout the movie and we see the daily "progress." Obstacles are many but the couple persists and kisses their way through all the problems.

Most of the film turns out to be sight gags and slapstick, especially when they have their "housewarming" at the end of the week and a big windstorm literally turns the house into a "merry-go-round."

If that isn't enough, you should see the ending when the train.......