I'm more indulgent towards this late Buster Keaton Columbia short than the other two reviewers on the IMDb. There's nothing fancy about this two reeler, it's basically three set-pieces -- in a hat shop, taming the drunken maid, and falling off the building -- around a plot to keep a stolen jewel from the police. It's not the strongest of Keaton's late shorts for Columbia, but it's formlessness allows Buster to infuse the short with a lot of inventive (and probably largely invented on the spot) physical comedy.
The hat shop scene in probably the weakest; the laughs are expected to come mainly from the funny prop hats the Buster shows off, but this only goes so far. The biggest laugh here comes from Buster's attempt to use a water basin as a mirror and hold it up his customer, and then to use a MOP to clean up someone wet.
The scene with the accidentally drunk maid is purely Keaton mining comedy from nothing but a table and a prostrate actress, and it works well despite the fact that Keaton's support, actress Elsie Ames, is way over the top and not too funny. This sequence and the next are played with hardly any dialogue, but I got a laugh purely out of the way Buster delivers the line "She's out... I hope." I will still argue with anyone who says he couldn't speak well.
The third act, after Buster has accidentally fallen out the window, is a curious echo of many 20s comedy involving Harold Lloyd and then many other comics hanging off buildings. Here it's very clear that back projection is being used rather than an actual high building, but it's so well played by the star, who seems to have influenced the material to fit the particular set-up of this film, that I don't mind.
This short may be clearly cheap and largely made up on the spot, but that's a large part of what makes it so charming and allows Buster the latitude create comedy out of the materials at hand.
