Dir: Eddie Cline,
Buster Keaton
Scr: Eddie Kline,
Buster Keaton
Phot: Elgin Lessley
Premiere: Aug. 29,
1920
25 min.
Buster Keaton is not only my favorite silent-era comic, but
he’s one of my favorite filmmakers, period. What puts him head and shoulders
above more popular contemporaries such as Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd is his
unique and comprehensive eye. They perform in front of the camera; Keaton
performs with the camera. Chaplin and Lloyd make faces, trade in sentiments;
Keaton maintains a stoic impassivity, and inadvertently implements a
philosophy.
Keaton was a natural clown. He was born to vaudevillians in
1895 and joined the act when he was 3 years old. The roughhouse comedic
acrobatics he learned from his father were the foundation of his unique
slapstick style. At the age of 21, he struck out on his own and decided to give
the fledgling movies a try.
He apprenticed under, served as sidekick to, and became
lifelong friends with, prominent film comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. Through
the production of 14 short movie comedies with him over the course of two
years, Keaton mastered the basics. By January of 1920, he got an offer from
producer Joseph M. Schenk. His own studio, $1,000 a week, 25 percent of the net
profits, and creative control. The Keaton Studio was open for business.
His first solo effort, The
High Sign, displeased him and was held by him from release for some time.
After completing an outside feature-performance project for Metro, The Saphead, Keaton got back to work.
The result is his first released, completely original production — One Week.
Keaton was known as “The Great Stone Face,” a persona he
developed that stood in stark contrast to the mobile features of Chaplin or the
determined grin of Lloyd. Keaton’s frozen-featured equanimity makes him his
films’ straight man. With never a raised eyebrow and only rarely a blink, his
character absorbs the blows of random fate with a peaceful patience that begins
to resemble optimism. Still waters run deep.
Certainly he personally could cope with, and overcome, the
vagaries of chaos. He was a gifted mechanic and designer, who knew how to
construct big gags and pull them off. Even in this first “real” film of his,
it’s evident how developed his visual-spatial sense is. He knows what the
camera can see and what it can’t see, and he decides to play with that, which
means he ends up playing with the ideas underpinning cinema itself. His aim is
purely practical. He wants to make up laugh. But his craftsmanship reveals a
profoundly thoughtful sense of humor.
His outlook is cynical; everything that can go wrong will,
hilariously, and the humor doesn’t always overcome the downbeat in his films.
The world is not hostile to Keaton; it just doesn’t factor him in, and he must
get along as best he can on his own. Life rewards and punishes in abundance and
at random; social acceptance is arbitrary and fleeting. No wonder Keaton’s wry
gloom attracted the attention of “serious” writers of the period from Federico
Garcia Lorca to Samuel Beckett.
One Week moves in
circles. Wheels within wheels. Buster’s cinematic universe has three
ever-larger, intermeshing gears: the individual, the social, and the universal.
The natural world stands over all. It is unfathomably complex, but it does
operate in accordance with its own (mostly) immutable laws. Buster’s own plans
and desires usually succeed, but only when he submits to and works with the
larger, natural world. In between, fouling everything up, is the complicating
human world — imperfect, blind to subtlety, averse to truth, wrong-headed.
In his later feature films, Buster arrives as a misfit and
exits as a hero. He doesn’t change — he’s simply fallen into phase with what’s
going on around him, and, like some white-faced Zen monk, manipulates the
universe so that it sets him neatly down, unharmed, at the finish line. One Week doesn’t take this tack. It’s a
catalog film, a situation dreamed up to provide a (here literal) framework for
a series of gags, growing in scope and complexity to a culminating payoff.
The inspiration for One
Week came from a 1919 Ford Motor Company documentary short, Home Made: A Story of Ready-Made House
Building. The possibilities for what David Robinson called “an accelerating
merry-go-round of catastrophes” suggested themselves easily. The title is a
play on the structure of the film and refers to Three Weeks, a 1907 libidinous romance novel by Elinor Glyn that
was the 50 Shades of Gray of its
time.
The film opens with Buster and his new bride (Sybil Seeley)
leaving the church. Guests pelt hem with rice and old shoes; Buster stops,
stoops, considers a pair, and tucks it practically under his arm.
A car ride sets the plot in motion and serves as a little
circular gag. Buster’s rival suitor unaccountably serves as their post-nuptial
chauffeur — Keaton refers to him as “the villain” in remembrance, and probably
needed to shoehorn him in as his film needed an antagonist. He hands them an
envelope telling them they are being given a house and a lot on which to build
it. The three characters then execute a jump from car to taxicab to motorcycle
and back again, during which Buster gets his rival in Dutch with the cops.
They arrive on site. Someone is
dumping crates off a truck. “Here’s your house!” he says. It’s a do-it-yourself
house kit! The directions read, “To give your house a snappy appearance put it
up according to the numbers on the boxes.” The rival obtains revenge by
changing the crate numbers, and the fun begins.
The gags pile up. Buster saws off
the beam he’s perched on, taking a tumble. Whole sections of the house are
misplaced, or swing dangerously to and fro. When we step back to see the house
in its entirety, it is indeed a surrealistic nightmare of misshapen windows, a
canted roofline, and mismatching walls. A big, strong mover crushes Buster
under the weight of a delivered piano (he later glances back at Buster, who
hops in fright).
The trick house, though all
“wrong,” is malleable (a porch railing becomes in an instant a ladder). Buster
can heave the piano into the house through an easily removed piece of wall, but
his attempt to raise it with a block and tackle simply “pulls” the floor above
stretchily down, provoking a boomerang effect that catapults his hapless rival
in the room above through the roof.
As the dates are torn off the calendar, we move through more
mishaps. Buster falls through the roof into the bathroom. (Earlier, his bride
drops the soap, and leans out of the tub to retrieve it — the cameraman
politely puts his hand over the lens.) He opens a door and steps out into thin
air, executing a two-story fall. Keaton was an enthusiastic if untrained
stuntman — the fall
Finally, the day of the housewarming comes — Friday the 13th.
A storm comes, and it turns out that house is so unstable that strong winds
spin it like a top. As the guests are flung around the inside of the house,
Buster tries over and over to get back over the threshold. Timing his jump, he
leaps into the pirouetting building — and is flung out just as neatly.
The scale of jokes grows bigger and bigger. When the dawn
comes, it also turns out that they built their home on the wrong lot and need
to move it across the railroad tracks. Of course, the towing job breaks down
just as they move into harm’s way. A whistle blows — smoke appears — a train
approaches in the background! The two clutch each other and brace for impact —
and the camera pans slyly right, showing us the train missing its mark, on an
adjacent track. They sigh with relief when BAM! A train barreling the other way
smashes the house to flinders.
Now we’ve come full circle, and the house is just a pile of
lumber again. Buster hangs a For Sale sign on the debris, and the couple walks
away, hand in hand. Keaton would make 16 more shorts and nine feature films. In
One Week, he is already on top of his
game.
The NFR is one
writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry
in chronological order. Next time: ‘Within Our Gates.’
SOURCES
Eagan, Daniel. “One Week,” National Film Registry.
My Wonderful World of Slapstick
Buster Keaton and Charles Samuels
Da Capo Press
1960
Keaton
Rudi Blesh
New York: The Macmillan Company
1966
Buster Keaton
David Robinson
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press
1969
The Silent Clowns
Walter Kerr
New York: Alfred A. Knopf
1975
Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase
Marion Meade
New York: HarperCollins Publishers
1995
Keaton’s Silent Shorts: Beyond the Laughter
Gabriella Oldham
Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press
1996
The Theater and Cinema of Buster Keaton
Robert Knopf
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
1999
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat
Edward McPherson
New York: Newmarket Press
2005
