One Week
About One Week
A bride and groom are given a kit house. A rejected suitor renumbers the crates, so the walls, the kitchen, and the doors come out wrong. At a housewarming on Friday the 13th a storm spins the building. They learn it stands on the wrong lot and try to roll it clear of a railroad crossing. One train passes on the next track. A second train smashes the house. The groom sticks a for-sale sign and the instructions on the pile, and the couple walk off.
Cast & crew
More about One Week
Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline wrote and directed it. Joseph M. Schenck produced. Elgin Lessley photographed it. Metro Pictures released it on 1 September 1920. Sybil Seely plays the bride. Joe Roberts is a piano mover. It was the first film Keaton released as his own independent production. The spinning house sat on a turntable. The collision was filmed at the Inglewood station with a real train. Keaton was hurt in a two-story fall after a bathroom gag and was treated with showers, olive oil, and horse liniment.
Themes
Background
Keaton's first release on his own, a two-reeler from Metro on 1 September 1920, after his time as Arbuckle's partner.
Making
Effects were full size. No model house was used for the wreck. The wrong numbers on the crates are the rejected suitor's work.
Look
Elgin Lessley shot the build, the turntable storm, and the Inglewood train crash with the house on the tracks.
Technique
The house was built on a turntable so the storm could spin it. A locomotive demolished the set at Inglewood.
Preservation
The Library of Congress placed it on the National Film Registry in 2008.
Notes
- The gags cluster on the house and on ladders.
- It parodies a 1919 Ford short, Home Made, which sold a house you could build in a week, and plays on the title of Elinor Glyn's 1907 novel Three Weeks.
- In the bath scene a hand covers the lens when Seely drops the soap.
- A plan to join it with The Boat (1921) as a four-reeler was dropped.
- Selected for the National Film Registry in 2008.
Scenes
- The storm spins the crooked house like a roundabout, with the party inside.
- One train misses. The next one flattens the house.
- Keaton plants a for-sale sign on the boards and leaves with Seely.
Influenced by
- Ford Motor Company short Home Made (1919)
