A Few Words on Battling Butler

Among Buster Keaton’s classic work, Battling Butler is considered a more so-so film, which I can see.  While entertaining, it doesn’t have the creative ingenuity, technical innovation, or comic achievement of films like Our Hospitality, The General, and Sherlock Jr.  Today, I want to look at one of Keatonians’ chief complaints about the film:  Buster’s character Alfred.

It’s true that Alfred only sort-of fits Buster’s normal zero-to-hero character arc.  He gets his big moment in the end, but it’s one short scene that only focuses on half the go-to qualities Buster’s character’s usually come into.  In other words, we get athleticism but not clever resourcefulness.  This knocks Alfred down a few pegs, and his demeanor throughout most of the boxing/training scenes is felt by many to be too comedic scaredy-cat.  Again, I get that.  More than once in a single scene, he does the patented comedy Leap o’ Fright into his coach’s arms (Scooby Doo, eat your heart out.)  Not only is it overkill, it feels out-of-place for Buster.  It makes Alfred seem like too much of a chump, and for some, it feels dangerously close to the milquetoast doofus character he was often saddled with in his MGM films, obviously to be avoided at all costs.

However, I think it’s important to remember where Alfred starts in the film.  Although Buster’s characters are often disaster-prone and clumsy at the outset, they also tend to be smart, intrepid, and scrappy.  Alfred, on the other hand, begins his movie completely helpless.  He doesn’t do anything for himself – it’s not for nothing that his catchphrase, delivered to his faithful valet, is, “Arrange it.”  He can’t hunt, fish, or kayak, he doesn’t sort out his own travel plans or bathwater, and he doesn’t really have a hand in his own marriage proposal.  He sends his valet to do the initial asking and he gets his proposal script from an advice column, most of which he doesn’t even have to say because his girl accepts after his first line.  This is a man who practically has “CANNOT FEND FOR HIMSELF” stamped on his top hat.  Given all that, it makes sense that he would be wholly befuddled and terrified at the prospect of, first pretending, and then actually training, to be a boxer.  He’s 100% out of his depth and not used to doing anything.  I can understand that he’d get his feet tangled in the ropes, try to play hooky from training, and run away from his sparring partner, and it’s realistic that his growth at the end of the movie isn’t as extensive as usual, since he started from so much farther back than most Buster characters.

(The big rebuttal here, I suppose, is, “What about Rollo?” and it’s a fair point.  He’s another dandy, but by the end of The Navigator, he’s become much more of a capable hero than Alfred.  My argument is twofold.  First, Rollo doesn’t start out quite as bad as Alfred.  At least he does his own proposing, even if he does get chauffeured across the street to his girlfriend’s house.  And second, to be perfectly honest, if I had to choose between keeping myself alive on a fully-equipped-but-empty passenger ship and running eight miles in sweats before having a stranger repeatedly punch me in the face, I’d be strongly tempted to go for the ship.  Just sayin’.)

So, I don’t think it’s at all a cheat that Alfred acts scared or wimpy.  With what we know of his character and situation, it’s a perfectly logical outcome.  The problem, of course, is that it’s way more fun to watch Buster be tenacious and enterprising and discover his inner athlete.  In other words, the character points make sense within the film, but even though it works in context, it doesn’t take advantage of what makes Buster so terrific.  This means that, for me, I agree that it’s a middling Buster film but don’t think it’s as problematic as it’s sometimes made out to be.