One Week (1920)
Newlyweds attempt to assemble a build-it-yourself house from a numbered kit, only for a jealous rival to scramble the crate numbers, setting off a cascade of architectural disasters that Buster Keaton turns into a symphony of collapsing gags.
Buster Keaton’s first release as an independent filmmaker, One Week is a tightly engineered catalogue of collapsing-house gags — the spinning, storm-battered structure alone justifies its reputation as one of the great short comedies of the silent era, and it was named to the National Film Registry in 2008.
Background
One Week was Buster Keaton’s first release after striking out as an independent filmmaker, having previously worked mainly as a supporting player and gag collaborator for comedian Roscoe Arbuckle. The film follows newlyweds attempting to assemble a build-it-yourself house from a numbered kit, a premise that unravels into chaos once a jealous rival scrambles the numbering on the crates, leading to an increasingly absurd structure.
What to watch for
Watch for the mechanical precision of the gags, each disaster escalates logically from the one before it, and for the sequence in which a storm sets the badly built house spinning on its foundation, one of the most celebrated physical comedy set pieces of the era. The film established, right at the start of Keaton’s independent career, the engineering-minded approach to visual comedy that would define his best-known features. It was selected for the National Film Registry in 2008.
