Family Matinee: Buster Keaton’s Marvelous Houses

Introduction
Dana Stevens

Dana Stevens—Slate’s film critic since 2006 and a cohost of the magazine’s weekly cultural podcast, Slate Culture Gabfest—is the author of Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century.

In One Week, Buster and his new bride have seven days to build a house from an assemble-it-yourself prefab kit. But even the best-laid plans have to be read right side up. This is an exercise in deconstruction and an amazingly clever little film that, among other things, tries on for size Steamboat Bill’s famous house a’falling stunt. “What Is a Home Without a Mother?” reads the sign on the wall of Buster and Big Joe Roberts’s bachelor pad in The Scarecrow—a marvelously inventive mechanical house designed for effortless living. The two guys also share the same gal, and her father disapproves of both of them. In The Electric House, Keaton, wrongly diplomaed as an electrical engineer, demonstrates the miracles of an all-electric house—a film that looks forward equally to Jacques Tati and Woody Allen.

— Judy Bloch

Films in this Screening

One Week

Eddie Cline, Buster Keaton, United States, 1920

FILM DETAILS

Language

Silent
with musical track

Print Info

B&W
DCP
23 mins

source

Cohen Film Collection

Additional Info

Restored by Cineteca di Bologna at L'Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory in association with Cohen Film Collection

The Scarecrow

Eddie Cline, Buster Keaton, United States, 1920

FILM DETAILS

Language

Silent
with musical track

Print Info

B&W
DCP
18 mins

source

Cohen Film Collection

Additional Info

Restored by Cineteca di Bologna at L'Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory in association with Cohen Film Collection

The Electric House

Eddie Cline, Buster Keaton, United States, 1922

FILM DETAILS

Language

Silent
with musical track

Print Info

B&W
DCP
23 mins

source

Lobster Films