Review of One Week

One Week (1920)
9/10
Nightmare house.
11 January 2012
One of Buster Keaton's best shorts One Week is filled with enough signature pratfalls and comic predicaments to fill a full length feature. Newlyweds Buster and wife (Sybil Seely) are given a house as a wedding gift by a relative. The only problem is they have to assemble it. This is further complicated by the fact that a spurned suitor jumbles the blueprints. Undeterred bride and groom role up their sleeves and begin to construct their comic disaster.

Keaton as usual takes an incredible pounding in producing one memorable sight gag after another with stoic resolve. Even as the house takes on a more Dada than craftsman look Buster's resolve and energy never wavers as he wrestles with a piano, lays carpet, puts a chimney on the roof and battles both the elements and a locomotive to save the homestead. As his wife Sybil Seely makes a durable partner sharing some of the bruises with the indefatigable Buster in this well paced short of one superlative slapstick scene after another.
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