''One Week'' is a 1920 American
two-reel
A short film is any motion picture that is short enough in running time not to be considered a feature film. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes ...
silent comedy film
A comedy film is a category of film which emphasizes humor. These films are designed to make the audience laugh through amusement. Films in this style traditionally have a happy ending (black comedy being an exception). Comedy is one of the ol ...
starring
Buster Keaton
Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton (October 4, 1895 – February 1, 1966) was an American actor, comedian, and filmmaker. He is best known for his silent film work, in which his trademark was physical comedy accompanied by a stoic, deadpan expression ...
, the first independent film production he released on his own. The film was written and directed by Keaton and
Edward F. Cline, and runs for 19 minutes.
Sybil Seely co-stars. The film contains a large number of innovative visual gags largely pertaining to either the house or to ladders.
In 2008, ''One Week'' was selected for preservation in the United States
National Film Registry
The National Film Registry (NFR) is the United States National Film Preservation Board's (NFPB) collection of films selected for preservation, each selected for its historical, cultural and aesthetic contributions since the NFPB’s inception i ...
by the
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is ...
as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Plot
![Keaton One Week 1920](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/Keaton_One_Week_1920.jpg)
The story involves a newlywed couple who receive a build-it-yourself house as a wedding gift. The house can be built, supposedly, in "one week". A rejected suitor secretly re-numbers packing crates. The groom struggles to assemble the house according to this new "arrangement". The result is a lopsided structure with revolving walls, kitchen fixtures on the exterior, and upper-floor doors that open onto thin air. During a housewarming party on
Friday the 13th, a storm spins the house and its occupants around like a merry-go-round.
As if this were not enough, the couple find they have built the house on the wrong lot and must move it. They manage to move it on rollers but it stalls on railroad tracks. The couple try to move it out the way of an oncoming train, which eventually passes on the neighboring track. As the couple look relieved, the house is immediately struck and demolished by another train coming the other way. The groom stares at the scene, places a 'For Sale' sign with the heap (attaching the building instructions) and walks off with his bride.
Cast
*
Buster Keaton
Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton (October 4, 1895 – February 1, 1966) was an American actor, comedian, and filmmaker. He is best known for his silent film work, in which his trademark was physical comedy accompanied by a stoic, deadpan expression ...
as the groom
*
Sybil Seely as the bride
*
Joe Roberts as piano mover
Production
Development
''One Week'' was likely inspired by ''Home Made'', an educational short film produced by the
Ford Motor Company
Ford Motor Company (commonly known as Ford) is an American multinational automobile manufacturer headquartered in Dearborn, Michigan, United States. It was founded by Henry Ford and incorporated on June 16, 1903. The company sells automobi ...
in 1919 to promote
prefabricated housing
Prefabricated homes, often referred to as prefab homes or simply prefabs, are specialist dwelling types of prefabricated building, which are manufactured off-site in advance, usually in standard sections that can be easily shipped and assembled. ...
. Keaton used numerous elements seen in the film, including "the wedding, the Model T and the use of the pages from a daily calendar to show the house being built in one week" in his comic parody. Years later, Keaton told an interviewer that the film's title is a play on ''
Three Weeks'', a notorious 1907 sex novel by
Elinor Glyn
Elinor Glyn ( Sutherland; 17 October 1864 – 23 September 1943) was a British novelist and scriptwriter who specialised in romantic fiction, which was considered scandalous for its time, although her works are relatively tame by modern stand ...
. Keaton reportedly joked that it was "one-third as scandalous".
Knopf notes that ''One Week'' is Keaton's first attempt to move away from a plot-driven narrative, as he employed in his earlier film ''
The High Sign
''The High Sign'' is a 1921 two-reel silent comedy film starring Buster Keaton, and written and directed by Keaton and Edward F. Cline. Its runtime is 21 minutes. Although '' One Week'' (1920) was Keaton's first independent film short released ...
'', toward mining more and more gags from a few basic elements—in this case, the house and ladders. According to
Kevin Brownlow
Kevin Brownlow (born Robert Kevin Brownlow; 2 June 1938) is a British film historian, television documentary-maker, filmmaker, author, and film editor. He is best known for his work documenting the history of the silent era, having become inter ...
, ''One Week'' "set the style for all the future Keatons; the opening gag sequence ... the slow build-up ... the frenetic climax ... and then that climax outmatched by the final sequence". Furthermore, the film lay the basis for the cinematic techniques of his future films: "The simple setups, the flat comedy lighting, the spare use of titles—and the overall excellence of the direction".
According to
Eleanor Keaton, Buster originally thought to combine two of his two-reel films, ''One Week'' and ''
The Boat'' (1921), into a four-reeler charting a young couple's adventures.
Virginia Fox
Virginia Oglesby Zanuck ( Fox; April 19, 1899 or 1902 or 1903 or 1906 – October 14, 1982) was an American actress who starred in many silent films of the 1910s and 1920s.
Life and career
Fox was born as Virginia Oglesby Fox in Wheeling, West ...
, who had been hired for the latter film, was replaced with
Sybil Seely who had starred in ''One Week''. However, the idea of combining the films never came to fruition.
Casting
Sybil Seely plays the young bride in her film debut. The mischievous rival ("Handy Hank") is an unknown actor.
Joe Roberts has a brief bit as a strong-man piano mover.
Filming and special effects
Many special effects, such as the house spinning around during a storm and the train collision, were filmed as they occurred and were not model work. The house was constructed on a turntable so that it could spin around during the storm scene. The train collision was filmed at the
Inglewood train station.
Keaton reused the gag of the side of a building falling on him, but emerging unscathed in the opening of a window in the wall, from the
Fatty Arbuckle
Roscoe Conkling "Fatty" Arbuckle (; March 24, 1887 – June 29, 1933) was an American silent film actor, comedian, director, and screenwriter. He started at the Selig Polyscope Company and eventually moved to Keystone Studios, where he worked w ...
–Keaton film ''
Back Stage
''Backstage'', also previously written as ''Back Stage'', is an American entertainment industry trade publication. Founded by Allen Zwerdling and Ira Eaker in 1960, it covers the film and performing arts industry from the perspective of performer ...
''; he would reuse the same joke in ''
The Blacksmith
''The Blacksmith'' is a 1922 American short comedy film co-written, co-directed by and featuring Buster Keaton. Buster plays an assistant blacksmith to the big worker played by Joe Roberts, with predictable results.
Cast
* Buster Keaton as ...
'' (1922) and ''
Steamboat Bill, Jr.'' (1928).
Keaton's fall down two stories after stepping out of the bathroom was one of the few times he injured himself badly. His arms and back swelled up a few hours after the filming. His physical trainer gave him both hot and cold showers and then treated the swelling with olive oil and horse
liniment.
The film is noted for a risqué (for its time) scene involving Seely's character taking a bath. She drops a bar of soap out of the tub and waits until (as a
fourth wall
The fourth wall is a performance convention in which an invisible, imaginary wall separates actors from the audience. While the audience can see through this ''wall'', the convention assumes the actors act as if they cannot. From the 16th cen ...
-breaking gag) someone's hand is placed over the camera lens so she can lean out and retrieve it. Although intended as a joke, the scene has appeared in a number of documentaries as an example of
pre-Hays Code censorship.
Release
''One Week'' was released on September 1, 1920. It is noted as the first of Keaton's independent releases, although he had filmed ''
The High Sign
''The High Sign'' is a 1921 two-reel silent comedy film starring Buster Keaton, and written and directed by Keaton and Edward F. Cline. Its runtime is 21 minutes. Although '' One Week'' (1920) was Keaton's first independent film short released ...
'' earlier. Keaton considered the latter film an inferior effort to debut with, and released it the following year when he was convalescing from an injury.
''One Week'' was one of the top-grossing releases of 1920.
Reception
''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' review said: "''One Week'', a Buster Keaton work, has more fun in it than most slap-stick, trick-property comedies".
''
The Muncie Evening Press'' wrote: "Buster Keaton's 'One Week' is one of the funniest pictures ever made and plants Buster firmly on his feet as star". ''
The Santa Clarita Valley Signal
The Santa Clarita Valley Signal is a newspaper in Santa Clarita, California. It was founded in 1919 as a weekly, the '' Newhall Signal.'' From c. 1979 to 2016, the ''Signal'' was owned by Savannah, Georgia-based Morris Multimedia, who sold it to ...
'' wrote: "If Buster Keaton in 'One Week' broke loose in a museum he'd tickle the mummies to life again. You never knew such fast and furious fun as this clever comedian provokes in his seven-day wonder". The Akron Evening Times agrees: "It is two reels in length and every foot of the two reels is packed with comedy situations and 'gags' that would start cackles at an undertaker's convention". The ''
Los Angeles Evening Express
The ''Los Angeles Herald-Express'' was one of Los Angeles' oldest newspapers, formed after a combination of the ''Los Angeles Herald'' and the '' Los Angeles Express''. After a 1962 combination with Hearst Corporation's ''Los Angeles Examiner'' ...
'' wrote, "Buster Keaton's 'One Week' stands in a comedy class by itself". By early 1921, the film was being termed "one of the famous Buster Keaton comedies".
More than half a century later,
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
theater and film critic
Walter Kerr
Walter Francis Kerr (July 8, 1913 – October 9, 1996) was an American writer and Broadway theatre critic. He also was the writer, lyricist, and/or director of several Broadway plays and musicals as well as the author of several books, genera ...
wrote in his 1975 book ''The Silent Clowns'', "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."
Other uses
Some of the themes of ''One Week'' were reused in
The Three Stooges
The Three Stooges were an American vaudeville and comedy team active from 1922 until 1970, best remembered for their 190 short subject films by Columbia Pictures. Their hallmark styles were physical farce and slapstick. Six Stooges appeared ...
' short film ''
The Sitter Downers
''The Sitter Downers'' is a 1937 short subject directed by Del Lord starring American slapstick comedy team The Three Stooges (Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Curly Howard). It is the 27th entry in the series released by Columbia Pictures starring th ...
'' (1937).
Guitarist
Bill Frisell
William Richard Frisell (born March 18, 1951) is an American jazz guitarist, composer and arranger. Frisell first came to prominence at ECM Records in the 1980s, as both a session player and a leader. He went on to work in a variety of contexts ...
released a soundtrack to the film in 1995 on his album ''
The High Sign/One Week''.
See also
*
Buster Keaton filmography
References
Sources
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External links
* ''One Week'' essa
by Daniel Eagan on the
National Film Registry
The National Film Registry (NFR) is the United States National Film Preservation Board's (NFPB) collection of films selected for preservation, each selected for its historical, cultural and aesthetic contributions since the NFPB’s inception i ...
website
*
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*
''One Week''at the
International Buster Keaton Society The International Buster Keaton Society Inc.— a.k.a. "The Damfinos"—is the official educational organization dedicated to comedy film producer-director-writer-actor-stuntman Buster Keaton.
Mission
According to the Damfinos, their mission is "t ...
{{DEFAULTSORT:One Week (1920 Film)
1920 films
1920 comedy films
Films directed by Buster Keaton
Films directed by Edward F. Cline
American silent short films
American black-and-white films
United States National Film Registry films
Articles containing video clips
Films produced by Joseph M. Schenck
Films with screenplays by Buster Keaton
Silent American comedy films
Surviving American silent films
1920s American films