One Week (1920)

• Year: 1920
• Released: 29 Aug 1920
• Country: United States
• Adwords: 1 win & 1 nomination
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0011541/
• Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/one_week
• Metacritics:
• Available in: 720p, 1080p,
• Language: None, English
• MPA Rating: TV-G
• Genre: Short, Comedy
• Runtime: 25 min
• Writer: Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton
• Director: Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton
• Cast: Buster Keaton, Sybil Seely, Joe Roberts
• Keywords: silent film, short film,

	8.1/10
	50% – Critics
	73% – Audience

One Week Storyline

Buster and Sybil exit a chapel as newlyweds. Among the gifts is a portable house you easily put together in one week. It doesn’t help that Buster’s rival for Sybil switches the numbers on the crates containing the house parts.—Ed Stephan

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One Week Movie Reviews

The blossoming of a comedy titan

Buster Keaton had been making films for three years, minus some time he was in the army, but this was his second film independent of his old friend and partner Roscoe Arbuckle. And it has a touch of something unseen in film up to that point – engineering as comedy. In 1920 comedy is just emerging from the pie throwing and pants kicking phase, and Buster is already on a completely different level from his colleagues.

Buster, still a bachelor himself, is shown emerging from a church with his new bride (Sybil Seely). They don’t have credited names, for this is not a personal journey for the main characters. The trouble starts immediately with Handy Hank, resentful that the bride turned him down and then chose Buster. Oddly enough this guy is driving them to their destination from the church, and that turns out to be a lot with a portable house deposited on it, both being a wedding gift from Buster’s uncle. There they find the house in boxes which they need to assemble themselves in the order of the numbers on the boxes. Handy Hank sees his chance for revenge by changing the numbers on the boxes so that the house will be assembled out of order.

The result is hilarious. The roof is on sideways, the porch is lopsided, there is a door to nowhere on the second floor that leads to the outside, and the rectangular windows have somehow installed to be a trapezoid, which is something that would be impossible just from incorrect installation. The kitchen sink has been installed on the outside of the house, but no problem, Buster has installed it such that it swivels like a revolving door and can thus double as a door and a sink that can be, in bad weather, moved inside. What about the foundation? Well, that becomes a problem later.

I’d highly recommend this as an introduction to Keaton even before you go back and watch his shorts done with Arbuckle and before his later independent efforts. It is much more carefully constructed than poor Buster’s house. P. S. – Such portable homes were commonly sold by catalogue in the United States during the first half of the 20th century.

the house that Buster built

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.