One Week |

The following is my contribution to Shorts! A Tiny Blogathon, hosted May 2-4, 2015 by the blog Movies Silently. Click on the banner above, and read bloggers’ critiques of short subjects from the dawn of film through 1970!

(WARNING: Major spoilers abound!)

“To sit through dozens and dozens of short comedies of the period and then to come upon One Week is to see the one thing no man ever sees: a garden at the moment of blooming.” –Walter Kerr, The Silent Clowns

One Week was added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 2008, and it darn well deserves it. This is the way to start a solo movie career.

The movie begins with an astonishing scene in which Buster and his new bride (Sybil Seely) move themselves from one moving car to another in order to avoid the advances of Hank the chauffeur (who just happens to be Mrs. Buster’s ex-boyfriend). The scene works like a cinematic Moebius strip, as the couple exits the second moving car, conks a cop on the head so that the traffic will allow the first moving car to advance in their direction, frames Hank for the cop-bopping, and then re-enter the first car as if nothing had happened. And this is a throwaway gag. Never mind Keaton’s superlative physical gifts; a director (Keaton co-directed with Eddie Cline) who starts off a movie that spectacularly has nerves of steel.

The crux of the story is the couple’s attempt to put together a do-it-yourself house from a kit they received as a wedding gift from Buster’s uncle. We already have misgivings when we see Buster saw off the end of a beam on which he’d been sitting, one story above the ground.

A harbinger of things to come.

Then jealous Hank sneaks in and sabotages the kit, and from then on, it’s quite clear that Buster would have been better off if his uncle had just bought him a toaster.

The biggest and funniest sight gag is the completed, deformed house, which endlessly produces gags like a slot machine spewing out coins. One can imagine Keaton viewing a house from all angles like a prism, uncovering every building-a-house gag imaginable. (In some of the set-ups and in Keaton’s spectacular stunts, one can also see the genesis of the wild climax of Keaton’s final independent movie, Steamboat Bill Jr.)

Praise should also be given to Sybil Seely who, as Buster’s bride, makes the first of five appearances with Keaton. Most of the Keaton canon is not very complimentary to women (perhaps reflecting Keaton’s contentiousness with “real” women in the 1920’s and ’30s). By contrast, Seely is sunny and holds her own with Keaton here. When Buster is baffled by the house’s awkward construction, or when a raging storm turns the house into a frantic merry-go-round, Seely truly seems a partner with Buster, trying to help him or sharing in his sorrows. She grounds the movie in domestic bliss, which makes the more farcical elements that much more plausible.

(There’s also a funny non sequitor where a naked Seely is about to step out of a bathtub, when suddenly an anonymous hand helpfully covers the camera lens to help Seely avoid embarrassing herself. Keaton would probably have called this “directorial commentary.”)

Whoops!

In a New Yorker article celebrating the centennial of Keaton’s birth, critic Anthony Lane gave up all pretense to modesty and called One Week “a strong candidate for the perfect short subject.” I’m not prone to such superlatives, but every time I watch the movie, I’m less and less inclined to disagree with Lane.

(If you have enjoyed this blog, I heartily invite you to visit The Love Nest – A Buster Appreciation Cult, my online, encyclopedic tribute to Keaton’s glorious silent movies from 1920 to 1928. Click here to visit.)

The following is my entry in “The Luck of the Irish Blog o’ Thon,” hosted by the blog Silver Scenes from March 15 to 17 in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. Click on the poster above, and read a variety of blogs celebrating cinema’s Irish heritage!

Famed silent film comedian Buster Keaton was born Joseph Frank Keaton on Oct. 4, 1895. Buster’s father, Joe, was of Scottish/Irish heritage. Keaton’s humor was not overtly Irish by any means. Yet there are certainly overtones of his ancestry throughout his life and his films.

Keaton began his show business career at the age of three as one of “The Three Keatons” (shown above), consisting of himself, his father Joe, and his mother Myra. The act was best known for Joe’s treatment of Buster. When Buster would goad his father on-stage, Joe made a point of throwing Buster into the scenery or even out into the orchestra pit.

This act got huge laughs, but it was also a huge source of controversy, then and now. Sob-sister Keaton biographers have tried to claim that this act was thinly disguised child abuse, and at the time of the act, child-care authorities were constantly trying to accuse Joe of same.

But it has been well-documented that Buster’s stage costume had a suitcase handle sewn into the back of it, and Buster learned early on how to take a fall like a pro, so that he was never injured as a result of the act. The authorities who were concerned about Buster examined him thoroughly and never found any bruises.

Nevertheless, this early “urban legend” has survived, with fact-free observers concluding that Keaton became the “stone face” character due to his having to take years of public abuse in stride. But Keaton’s films well demonstrate that he knew how to take a fall without getting hurt. Here is just one example, from Keaton’s solo debut film One Week (1920):

What is surely most “Irish” about Keaton’s movie persona is his stoicism in the face of calamity. The world seems to constantly knock Buster about, and he seems just as constantly to take it with a shrug, as though he knows the world won’t give him an inch and yet he’s still determined to make his way in it.

Buster began his film career in 1917 supporting Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, who was one of the most popular film comedians of his time, second only to Charlie Chaplin in box-office revenues. Buster proved to be such a magnetic film presence and laugh-getter that eventually Joseph Schenck, Arbuckle’s producer, moved Keaton into Chaplin’s former studio and, from 1920 to 1928, produced short films and features co-written and -directed by Keaton that are now regarded as some of the most remarkable comedies of the silent film era.

To simply catalog some of Buster’s movie highlights is to list some of silent movies’ most famous stunts. In the aforementioned One Week, Buster and his newlywed bride try to build a do-it-yourself house that has been unknowingly sabotaged by the bride’s former boyfriend. resulting in one physical catastrophe after another.

There’s also: Buster swooping over a waterfall to save his girl in Our Hospitality (1923). Buster riding on the handlebars of a driverless motorcycle in Sherlock Jr. (1924). And Buster having a two-ton wall fall on him in Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928), escaping death only because of the wall’s open window falling down around him.

Most famously, there was his stunt-as-movie, The General (1926), in which Buster plays a Civil War train engineer from Georgia who singlehandedly fights Northern troops with his train as his only weapon. The camera in this movie seems almost as astonished as we the audience are, as it records Buster jumping off, on, over, and on top of his moving train and making it look as effortless as riding a bike.

All of this was done long before CGI…and all of it was done by Keaton. Other than a high-hurdle in Keaton’s film College (1927) that was performed by an Olympic jumper, Buster did each of his stunts himself, in long shot. Keaton was achingly conscientious about performing “on the level,” demonstrating the hurdles his character went through rather than leaving them to an anonymous stunt man. (Keaton’s famous comment about why he went to all of this physical trouble himself: “Stunt men don’t get laughs.”)

Sadly, after eight years of artistic freedom, producer Schenck pulled the rug out from under Keaton. He sold Keaton’s contract to Metro-Goldywn-Mayer, where Keaton became just another contract player who had no say in the scripts or direction of his M-G-M movies.

Keaton had been known as a fairly hard drinker even before his contract was sold. When Keaton lost control over his movies, he drowned his sorrows in alcohol, to the point that M-G-M couldn’t take him anymore and fired him.

After a long period where his life spiralled out of control — his wife divorced him and changed their children’s last name from “Keaton”; he married another woman while in an alcoholic daze and later divorced her — Keaton eventually picked himself up. He returned to movies in cheap comedy shorts for Educational and Columbia Pictures. And in 1940, he married an actress and dancer named Eleanor Norris, who was 23 years younger than Keaton. Friends were certain the marriage wouldn’t stick, but it lasted until Keaton’s death in 1966.

Buster and Eleanor.

So in the end, the story of the real-life Keaton paralleled that of his screen persona. He went through a major series of hard knocks but came out on top at the end. Fortunately, Keaton lived long enough to see a “renaissance” of his silent movies, which finally got the full appreciation they deserved.

Finally, if you have any doubts about Keaton’s Irish heritage, here is a clip from Buster Keaton Rides Again, a documentary filmed a year before Keaton’s death. In particular, note Keaton’s response to a cake that is presented to him in honor of his 69th birthday.