The Haunted House (1921)

Objectively, I’d call this a fairly good midrange Buster Keaton short.  Subjectively?  I just love it.  Even while I know the plot has some clunkiness and “being scared of fake ghosts” is a pretty flimsy theme to hang a story on, I have such a good time watching this short.

Buster is a well-meaning but disaster-prone bank teller who finds himself on the wrong side of an accusation of counterfeiting (because of course.)  Unjustly on the lam, he winds up fleeing to the actual counterfeiters’ hideout, which they’ve rigged up to seem like a haunted house – ostensibly, it’s so the police won’t poke around, but it feels like they’ve put way more effort into this than the idea strictly warrants.  Anyway, Buster has his hands full dodging “ghosts,” trying to expose the real crooks, and maybe even saving a pretty girl along the way.

For me, the absolute zenith of this short is the first 6-7 minutes, while Buster is still working at the bank.  It’s true that the connections between this sequence and the haunted house stuff are tenuous at best, but it’s so fantastically funny that I’ll never complain.  I adore Buster accidently getting glue on his hands, which in turn gets on the money, the customers, and basically everything in the nearby vicinity.  It’s such a simple concept and, compared to some of Buster’s other work, a pretty obvious gag, but he does it masterfully.  When I think of The Haunted House, the first thing that pops into my head is invariably Buster trying to “put ‘em up” while his hands are glued to the insides of his pockets.  I die.

Compared to that, the haunted-house portion of the short isn’t as memorable to me.  The fact that Buster is genuinely scared of all these shenanigans is kind of cheesy, and the gags tend more toward the disjointed-running-around variety, not building as organically.  Still, there are some incredibly fun gags to be had.  There’s a set of disappearing stairs that Buster just works comic wonders with – I think he comes up with an entirely new hook every time it’s used.  He has a fabulous method for knocking one of the bad guys out, he plays around with some fun camera trickery, and he fights a fierce battle against a red cape.  And for all that his being scared of the haunted house is silly, his acting scared is wonderful.  Even with the stone face, he does such terrifically funny “frightened” acting.  The ending is just sort of there, but it’s immediately prefaced with a delightfully off-the-wall comedic tangent about Buster’s misadventures in trying to reach the afterlife.

The short also features old Buster favorites Big Joe Roberts as the head counterfeiter (what can I say?  The guy gives good heavy) and Virginia Fox as the girl, charming but pretty underdeveloped.

Warnings

Slapstick violence and a little gunplay.