Directed by: Buster Keaton.
Written by: Paul Girard Smith & Al Boasberg & Charles Henry Smith and Lex Neal.
Starring: Buster Keaton (Alfred Butler), Snitz Edwards (His Valet), Sally O'Neil (The Mountain Girl), Walter James (Her Father), Budd Fine (Her Brother), Francis McDonald (Alfred Battling Butler), Mary O'Brien (His Wife), Tom Wilson (His Trainer), Eddie Borden (His Manager).
With
Battling Butler, Keaton made one of his most popular features at the time he
was a star in the 1920s – but his least interesting feature when his career is
looked back upon some 90 years later. The film is essentially Keaton on cruise
control as he once again plays a wealthy idiot who must prove his manhood –
much like he did in The Navigator (1924). Here, his parents are sick of him lazing
about the house doing nothing, so they order him to go off into the woods to
camp, hunt and fish and become a real man. “Arrange it” he orders his valet,
who dutifully obliges. Once in the wilderness however, Keaton’s Alfred Butler
doesn’t really become a man himself, but rather falls in love with a Mountain
Girl (Sally O’Neil). Her family, much like his, doesn’t think he’s manly enough
– so he perpetrates a ruse where he pretends to be the famous Alfred “Battling”
Butler – a famous prizefighter. He even strikes a deal with his same-named to
keep up the ruse for a while – but it all falls apart of course, leading to a
surprisingly brutal fight between the two to climax the movie.
The
fight that ends the movie is the highlight of the movie, and really the only
reason to see it. As always, Keaton was a master of physical comedy and stunt
work, and the battle that ends the film is well choreographed, violent,
stunning and funny all at the same time. It’s not the best work he’s ever done,
but it’s still fine.
The
rest of the movie however really is quite dull. Keaton had played a millionaire
before – as I mentioned in The Navigator as well as The Saphead (1920) – a film
he had no part in writing or directing (which is why I didn’t review it for
this series). He had also played a man out of his element in the wild before in
his short – The Balloonatic (one of his weakest). And obviously, he has played
a man who has to prove himself worthy in pretty much all of his films. That was
Keaton’s stock character – a determined, but often hapless, young man who gets
one thing after another thrown at him, but he keeps his head down, his face
stone, and barges on through. It is an effective character for Keaton that
worked wonders throughout his career. However, given that it is a similar
character almost every time out, when the results are somewhat less inspired –
as was the case with Battling Butler – it starts to feel stale – as if Keaton
is simply coasting on his immense charm.
Part
of the problem could well be the film’s stage roots. Keaton also adapted Seven
Chances from a stage play – and not coincidentally, the parts of both movies
that work best are the parts that most likely were not part of the stage plays
he adapted – the chase sequence that takes up the last third of Seven Chances,
and the fistfight that ends Battling Butler. He’s on much shakier ground in the
plot heavy parts of both films – but because the plot of Seven Chances was so
simple, it allowed him to mainly string together inspired visual gags. In
Battling Butler, with its complicated comedic plot of misunderstandings,
misdirection and misidentification, Keaton has to have far too many scenes
where people are explaining everything to each other – which in a silent movie
can be deadly.
Battling
Butler certainly has its charms - nothing Keaton did was ever wholly worthless,
and this film is no exception. But it is a film that I can fairly confidently
say would have long since been forgotten had it not been directed by a genius.
It was however, so now it stands as probably the weakest feature film of that
genius’s career.
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