Saltarello e la casa incantata

Buster Keaton plays a bank clerk who foils a team of bank robbers using a supposedly haunted house to evade capture by the police. An odd film of two distinct halves: a painfully protracted - and largely unfunny - sequence in which Keaton inadvertently glues himself to masses of banknotes eventually gives way to a breathtakingly funny second half in which he strays into the haunted house of the title. You will be astounded by the number of laughs the little genius can get out of a flight of collapsible stairs...

A simple story. And its impressive effect. A bank clerk becoming from fake thief the hero of a small comunity, actors giving a mediocre Faust becoming guests of a haunted house, glue, money and a band of bad guys. Like each short film of Buster Keaton, the innocence is the basic trait of movie and the lead source of seduction.

There's never a dull moment in this Buster Keaton two-reeler, "The Haunted House." From Keaton making a mess as a bank teller, inadvertently stopping a robbery in the process, to his hiding from the police in the titular haunted house, where he stumbles across some more crooks, who've disguised themselves as ghouls and engineered the house with a staircase that turns into a slide. My favorites Keaton vehicles tend to be those where the humor is based self-reflexively in cinema, including "The Playhouse" (1921), "The Frozen North" (1922), "Sherlock Jr." (1924) and "The Cameraman" (1928). A couple gags here have a similar foundation. The head baddie explains the staircase trap in a kind of hypothetical vision where we see police being foiled by the trick. There's a play-within-the-play of "Faust," where Mephistopheles is chased off the stage to the haunted house by a rioting audience. And there's the dream/hallucination scene that references the other staircase and the other devil. Clever.

Note: Recently, I've been investigating the origins of the old dark house subgenre on screen, which is how I came upon reviewing this film. Although others have cited it as an early instance of such pictures, I'm not so sure. There's a haunted house and cash hidden in it, I guess, but none of the other tropes found in such films as "One Exciting Night" (1922), "The Monster" (1925), "The Bat" (1926), "The Cat and the Canary" (1927), "The Bat Whispers" (1930), "The Old Dark House" (1932) and even fellow silent comedian Harold Lloyd's "Haunted Spooks" (1920). I suppose the distinction between "old dark house" and "haunted house" is slight, though.

This is one of MANY shorts that buster Keaton made over his long career. None of them were intended as deep entertainment but contained a lot of funny low-brow humor--full of pratfalls galore! Well, this one is certainly no different.

Buster is a bank teller who is accused of cheating the bank and having passed forged money. The interminably long scene involving glue and money, by the way, is the absolutely WORST part of the film--it goes on way too long. However, once he is fired and accidentally goes to the haunted house (how he knew to go there since it was the crooks' hideout is amazing), the film picks up a lot of speed. The fun intensifies as the crooks try very hard to scare Buster. When he quickly figures that the ghosts are fake, then the crooks try to kill him! Watch the film to find out the cute conclusion and have a few laughs along the way.

Since the haunted house is only 1/3 of the movie, the title of the movie should have been The Bank Teller which Buster Keaton portrayed. Most of the movie takes place in the bank which Keaton operated and was later accused of robbing. Or, the movie should have been called Sticky Situation since the biggest laughs of the movie came when Keaton gets glue all over him and the money from the bank. Although the movie's climax is the haunted house, much of the physical comedy happens way before the movie's closing. An interesting look into heaven and hell as Keaton imagines dying and riding the stairway and slide to heaven and then hell. A good Keaton classic, The Haunted House has several moments that are funny and very enjoyable.