A Casa Maluca

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.

Probably one of my favourite 2 reelers, my 11 year daughter loves it as much as I do, it says something about Keaton that he can win over a die hard Harry Potter fan with his magic. Who cares about lightweight plots when something is as funny as this. the movie starts of with Buster at his place of work, a bank, from the very start the jokes come in thick and fast and always funny. After being falsely accused of being a bank robber he escapes to the local 'haunted' which is really a cover for a gang of counterfeiters, also in the house are the cast of a lousy version of 'Faust'who are escaping a hostile audience(the intertitle that introduces them is one of the funniest lines in any movie). There are lots of acrobatics in Buster's own inimitable style and the pace is fast and furious. The ending is brilliant and watch out for the bit where Buster runs towards the camera and mugs into it. I just love this movie and if you have a sense of humour then so will you.

'How do I love Keaton? Let me count the ways...'

As I watch more and more of Buster Keaton's films, I find myself reduced to a state of abject adoration that I am at an almost complete loss to convey; it's easier by far to comment on the individual elements that may disappoint in any given film, but this totally fails to reflect the sheer degree of enthusiasm that they create. Yet again I'm struggling to find words -- the shorts are funnier, the features are more touching, and I wouldn't have missed any one of them. The landscapes of my mind's eye have become peopled by a positive kaleidoscope of Busters, tumbling, leaping, hapless or inspired, resigned to the inevitable but endlessly alert to the passing balletic chance. I've roared with laughter and gasped in surprise and had my heart melted in sympathy; I've marvelled at his athletics and been astounded at the range of his acting. In short, in the space of twenty-odd films and the passage of a month, I have simply become an utter Buster Keaton addict.

"Haunted House" I particularly liked -- better, in fact, than "The Electric House" with which it is unfavourably compared, merely because the structure of the latter is comic-strip predictable: gadgets introduced, gadgets go wrong. "Haunted House" has the lunatic juxtapositions that are Keaton's craft at its best, as his hero gets mixed up with bank robbers, opera singers and a counterfeiters' conspiracy -- the sheer ingenuity and variety of the jokes that can be based around a single staircase had the audience in stitches, as every time we thought we knew what was going to happen, Buster came up with a fresh approach to the problem!

The film has been dismissed as consisting merely of two disjointed halves, but "Sherlock Jr" -- where the famous dream sequence is almost totally without effect on the main plot -- demonstrates that this is no drawback. Certainly in the case of "Haunted House" one would not wish to lose either part. The introductory sequence, where Buster inadvertently finds himself in a position to save the day, only to become a scapegoat, is classic Keaton comedy. The second part takes the place of the extended chase to which such a plot line would normally lead, with all the parties converging on the same booby-trapped building to terrify the wits out of each other... until, that is, Buster's "little idiot", dismissed by the villains as harmless, is the one to work out what's going on.

This development, of course, enables Keaton to have the best of both worlds, milking the comic possibilities first of his character's horror and then of his blasé scepticism -- one rightly-renowned sequence is where he steps in to take control of the spook 'traffic'! Even self-possession and preparation, however, aren't necessarily going to help him with that staircase...

In the space of its brief twenty minutes, this surreal short film features an amazing trick photography shot, some classic sticky mime, deadpan titles, long-running gags with a multiple twist, the cloak of Mephistopheles, a celestial fantasy, plus a bonus ten-second seduction of Buster -- what's not to love? ;-)

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.

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.