The Electric House

Graduation day at P.U. finds Buster Keaton's character graduating with a degree in botany. He is seated next to a girl graduating with a degree in cosmetology and a man with a degree in electrical engineering. The dean (Big Joe Roberts) asks for someone to take on the job of wiring his house for electricity while he is away on vacation. Just prior to this the diplomas get scrambled and Keaton winds up with the engineering one. Thus, the job winds up going to him. The dean drives away from his home with Keaton sitting at the curb diligently reading "Electricity Made Easy". When the dean returns Keaton has wired the house in only a way that Buster could devise making heavy use of automated trains - Keaton's favorite prop. The plot is complicated when the guy with the actual engineering degree shows up at the dean's house in search of revenge.

Buster always said that if he hadn't been a comedian he would have liked to have been an engineer, and shorts like this one show he had a real talent for both. Highly recommended.

A wonderfully inventive companion piece to The Scarecrow, this mechanical comedy by Keaton often makes me wonder if it isn't possible to go back in time and hire Keaton to design a house for me.

Due to a mix-up of diplomas, the young hair-stylist character of Keaton is asked to wire a mansion with electricity. Spending a moment with a book on "Wiring Made Easy" and the mansion owner's vacation time, Keaton devises escalators, train-propelled dishwashers, and all the neat little gadgets and tricks that "surprise" them (whether or not any of these flourishes are needed, of course, adds its own amount of humor to the equation).

Of course it's not like we can have everything just go well like that, so the rejected and jealous actual electrical engineer decides one fateful day to wreak vengeance upon the circuitry. It's then a trip of mayhap and mayhem as the hosting family tries to entertain guests, Keaton tries to figure out what's wrong, and bodies, dishes, and pool balls go flying amiss.

The appealing result is a good chuckle. It's definitely not as amazingly inventive as The Scarecrow (which is absolutely mind-boggling in its mechanical genius), but it does the job and does it well. It also doesn't really end the way you come to expect of Keaton. All in all, however, it's a pretty good time.

--PolarisDiB

It's funny; the other day I watched Buster Keaton's "College," which starts off with a high school graduation. My next Keaton movie, this one, begins with a college ceremony. Yes, once again, the graduates look more like their fathers than 22- year-old people.

The degrees get mixed up somehow and the Dean thinks Buster has graduated with an Electrical Engineering degree and hires him to wire his house while he and the family go on vacation. Buster knows nothing about that sort of thing but reads a quick how-to-do-it book. The next thing we know, we see the house with all the gadgets.

This was pretty amazing stuff. I didn't think they even had the technology in the early '20s to do this sort of thing. Shows you what I know. Anyway, we see all kinds of James Bond-type tricks from swimming pools that drain and refill within seconds to mechanical billiard tables to train tracks feeding the family. There too many of these crazy things (a bathroom on tracks going right to the bed was one of my favorites!) to list them all.

Suffice to say they are fun to watch. Unfortunately, the real engineer gets wind of what happened, sneaks into the house and sabotages the gadgets while the family is showing them off to guests. Unfortunately (again), justice is not served in this film....or is it? There's a strange ending to this film, too, and makes me wonder if Buster wasn't a bit suicidal. I guess not, since he lived a fairly long time.

There is no real plot in here; just gags....which is fine for a short film, except I found this was so fast-paced in the first half that by the 15-minute mark it seemed almost too long, if that's possible. It seemed like a long 22 minutes.

In addition to the remarkable stunt-work that makes his films unique, Buster Keaton often employed the odd mechanical gadget, and there's certainly much amusement to be found in his technical creativity. 'The Electric House' is a 20-minute short film that dedicates itself entirely to Keaton's gadgets, as a young botany graduate is mistakenly hired as an electrical engineer to wire up a new home. After perusing a book entitled "Electricity Made Easy," Keaton develops a selection of clever and useful household contraptions, including an escalator, a railway system that delivers food to the dinner table, a quick-emptying and re-filling outdoor pool and a self-operating billiards table. Some of the mechanical devices don't quite work as planned, but generally Keaton has done a fair job, and he has certainly invented a few mechanisms that I wouldn't mind having in my own home (assuming, of course, that they operated as they were supposed to).

However, the begrudging electrical engineering graduate who missed out on the job arrives at the new electric house to wreak havoc and achieve his revenge. From the moment he starts moving about wires, the contraptions inside the home begin to go crazy, and poor Keaton is completely at their mercy, unable to understand why his inventions have gone haywire. Of course, there are a few gags that don't quite work {such as Keaton thinking he's seen a ghost}, and the editing is a little choppy at times, but it's all in such good fun that you won't feel disappointed. A lot of amusement is derived from something as simple as an escalator {which was then a relatively new invention, only 25 years or so years old}, with Keaton, in one particularly funny sequence, trying to haul a bulky suitcase up the "stairs" and bafflingly wondering why he's making such little progress.

As the hapless hero, Keaton takes his fair share of beatings from the mechanical devices {in fact, production had to be delayed because he broke his ankle after it got caught in the escalator}, but the other members of the household don't escape unscathed. Joe Roberts plays the disgruntled homeowner whose house is equipped with mischievous gadgetry, and he gets acquainted with the property's swimming pool on at least two entertaining occasions. Though Keaton has certainly done funnier comedic shorts, 'The Electric House (1922)' is an amusing way to pass 20 minutes, and the star's undeniable enthusiasm for slapstick comedy makes his work always worth a watch.

Buster Keaton stars as botany major who is mistaken as electrical engineer, and who is hired to wire up a house with the newest gadgets, while the owner of the house is on a vacation with his family. After returning home Buster starts to familiarize the house owners with new gadgets. But then Buster's big rival, the guy who got robbed of his job, arrives and starts to sabotage the house, and soon the chaos escalates.

Most of the gags feature some of the electrical gadgets, rather than neck breaking stunts, but still the film is funny as the jokes are as inventive as the electrical systems of the house.