Evidently a direct satire of a then well-known Ford Motor Company advertisement (build your own prefab house in just seven days), Buster Keaton's One Week works just as well with no prior knowledge of the source. It follows a hapless bride and groom, newlyweds fresh from the chapel, who are gifted just such a boxed home and proceed to naïvely plow into every roadblock and pitfall imaginable. Not that the couple is free of blame - their approach to every problem is fundamentally backwards - but a few mean-spirited bits of sabotage from a jilted suitor certainly do them no favors.
It's a natural playground for Keaton, who creatively misuses every step of the construction process: failing to secure load-bearing walls, blindly feeling his way up a ladder with a brick chimney over his head, sprinting through a second-story doorway into thin air, lazily failing to properly install carpeting over the floorboards. The problems persist even after the dwelling is complete, with a harsh windstorm revealing every shortcut to unsuspecting housewarming guests, and yet the stakes rise still higher from there. The climax, a literal runaway house rumbling towards a busy set of train tracks, serves as a prime example of Keaton's gigantic, ludicrously ambitious sense of scale. Go big or go home, the saying says, and Buster really went for it this time, stretching his luck so thin he was laid up in a doctor's office before the end of production. This wouldn't be the last time.
It's a natural playground for Keaton, who creatively misuses every step of the construction process: failing to secure load-bearing walls, blindly feeling his way up a ladder with a brick chimney over his head, sprinting through a second-story doorway into thin air, lazily failing to properly install carpeting over the floorboards. The problems persist even after the dwelling is complete, with a harsh windstorm revealing every shortcut to unsuspecting housewarming guests, and yet the stakes rise still higher from there. The climax, a literal runaway house rumbling towards a busy set of train tracks, serves as a prime example of Keaton's gigantic, ludicrously ambitious sense of scale. Go big or go home, the saying says, and Buster really went for it this time, stretching his luck so thin he was laid up in a doctor's office before the end of production. This wouldn't be the last time.