Battling Butler (1926)

 

This is regarded as a middle-of-the-pack Buster Keaton film, and he has enough magnificent offerings that this one is understandably middling, but I like it a lot.  From where I stand, you never go wrong when Buster plays a sheltered dandy, and while the plot is a bit routine, it’s fun and peppered with great gags.

 

As far as Buster’s dandies go, Rollo from The Navigator remains my favorite, but Alfred Butler is no slouch, comedy-wise.  This pampered rich boy’s catchphrase is “Arrange it,” delivered lazily to his tireless valet (played with spark by Snitz Edwards, who’s in several of Buster’s movies.)  He’s never had to do anything for himself and his parents, worried that he’ll grow up soft, send him on a hunting trip to make a man out of him.  Of course, staying in a spacious tent with a bed, a dresser, and a valet to prepare your bathwater isn’t exactly roughing it.  (He brings a top hat, on a hunting trip – I love it.)

 

Still, a fire is lit under Alfred’s rear after all when he meets and falls for a charming mountain girl.  Unfortunately, his valet’s efforts to sell her salt-of-the-earth family on the prospective marriage don’t go as planned.  Alfred is dismissed as a wimp, and the valet, in a fit of desperation, rebuts that Alfred is in fact Battling Butler, the up-and-coming boxer preparing to fight the featherweight champ.  This earns the admiration of the girl and her family, but it puts Alfred in the precarious position of keeping up the ruse.

 

Needless to say, a series of misunderstandings and misadventures leads to Alfred having to actually train as a boxer.  Despite his obvious ineptitude and powerful desire to avoid it like the plague (he turns out to have a remarkable talent for shirking road work,) he’s dragged into the ring – once he’s detangled from the ropes, that is.  There’s one point where, having already been caught up several times, he’s determined to leap the ropes this time, and the ensuing momentum, combined with being inevitably snagged again, spins him around and propels him out and under.  It’s fantastic, and I could watch it all day.

 

After all of Alfred’s luxuriating, it’s great fun to see him forced to genuinely work at something.  Yes, he tries to get out of it at every time (I would too, Alfred,) but in the end, he goes through all the effort and pain and fear (and quasi-farcical interference-running, when his new wife shows up at the training camp) because he loves his wife so much and doesn’t want her to find out he lied.

 

Also, the final shot is perfect.  Buster has a real flair for closing scenes, and while Our Hospitality is my gold standard, this is up there as one of my favorites.  I love that – so many comedies end on a contented sigh, a gentle fade-out of resolution after the denouement, where we see that the characters are going to be all right.  Buster gives us the resolution, but not the gentle fade-out.  Most of his movies end with an exclamation point, a last parting gag to ensure that you greet the “The End” with one more peal of laughter.

 

Warnings

 

The usual slapstick violence, plus lots of boxing violence, of course.