One Week

What a wonderful short feature this is - it's very funny, filled with creative gags and exciting stunts, and also quite charming. The plot follows newlywed Buster and his wife in their first week together, as they attempt to build, furnish, and settle into their new 'do-it-yourself' home. There are lots of very wacky moments, with a great variety of inventive comic material. It's also quite endearing to watch the young couple having to contend with all the difficulties they face in setting out together. Keaton is really good at making his character sympathetic without getting bogged down in pity that would detract from the great humor.

"One Week" deserves its reputation as one of Keaton's finest achievements. It's a must-see for anyone who has even a passing interest in silent comedies.

An early Buster Keaton short which still has an enormous amount of charm all these years later, and which has plenty of laughs throughout its running time.

First there's a wedding, and the newlyweds almost don't make it to their wedding night; and then there is the portable house they have to start from scratch! Of course this means the house looks wrong, it falls down, lots of stunts and scenes are set up to make the audience gasp and chuckle, and so on.

'One Week' is a really fun film and one which is timeless. Keaton would make many more shorts and his great feature-length movies were yet to come, but this is charming snapshot of what was to come.

Keaton was now out on his own, no longer working with Fatty Arbuckel. 'One Week'was his first independent film. Joseph Schneck produced the film, having done work on the Fatty and Keaton shorts. The team of Buster Keaton and Eddi Cline directed and did script work as would follow in most of Keaton's other shorts. 'One Week' is definitive of Buster Keaton's style. It is purely gag over narrative. Keaton's performance is more important than the story, and that was pretty much how all his later movies worked. Keaton also enjoyed capturing the world around him as it happened. His stunts in this movie did not rely on editing. The house really did turn, the train sequence was real. This was a good beginning to what followed.

Buster gets married, and as a wedding present his uncle gives him and his new bride some land and a house to go with it, but only when they get to the lot do they realised that the house is not yet assembled!

The framing device of the week both gives Keaton the opportunity to devise seven comic episodes, and also gives the whole piece a wonderful unity. I rank this alongside The Boat (1921) as one of Keaton's best shorts, alongside The Electric House (1922) for the best use of gadgets (in case you didn't know, Keaton trained as an engineer, and so his films are filled with marvellously clever gadgets), and alongside The Scarecrow (1920) for general fun and enjoyment.

For me, this was THE perfect Keaton comedy.

A house. Not assembled. A young couple. And a week. One of the most seductive films of Buster Keaton. For imagination, for the feel to see an animation, for lovely-dramatic story - the storm has a lead role- for the end and for the trait of genius. Something sad - magic defines this short film. One of the lovely ones for its humor and for the beautiful way for explore the force of details.