The wedding bells have such a sweet sound but such a sour echo.— opening intertitle
One Week is an 1920 short film starring
Buster Keaton and Sybil Seely as newlyweds who receive a DIY portable house as a wedding gift. They spend a week assembling it with disastrous results thanks to sabotage by a rejected suitor, as well as their own hilarious ineptness.
This film is in the public domain and can be viewed in its entirety at
Google Video
.
"One Week" provides examples of:
- Agony of the Feet: Sybil stamps her foot ... onto her other foot, and makes the classic one-foot hopping exit.
- Amusing Injuries
- Anvil On Head: Buster is repeatedly flattened by a piano.
- Aside Glance: Sybil grins at the audience while in the bath.
- Bizarrchitecture
- Bookcase Passage
- An entire wall of the house pivots around a horizontal beam, causing Buster, who'd been perched above a second-story window, and Sybil, who was seated on the sill of a first-story window, to change places.
- The kitchen sink is on a rotating wall.
- By Wall That Is Holey: Preceded by a vertical bookcase passage (see above).
- Chase Scene: Unusually brief for a Keaton film.
- Doom It Yourself: I'm pretty sure any halfway competent architect or construction foreman would have realized there was a problem.
- Exploding Calendar
- Film the Hand: As Sybil leans out of the tub to retrieve the soap, a hand is placed over the lens to protect her modesty.
- Foreshadowing
- Green-Eyed Monster: Hank.
- Irony: The title on the sheet music placed on the piano, which has just made a crater in the floor? "The End of a Perfect Day."
- It Got Worse: On top of everything else, they built the house on the wrong lot.
- Love Triangle: Buster, Sybil, and "Handy Hank."
- Moment Killer: The newlyweds' attempts to kiss in the backseat of a car are thwarted because the driver, Hank, keeps leering at them.
- Outside Ride: To get away from moment killer Hank, the newlyweds switch cars — in mid-drive. Buster has a little trouble.
- Artistic License - Physics
- Railroad Tracks of Doom
- Read the Freaking Manual: Averted. The newlyweds did read the directions, but the parts had been renumbered.
- Shout Out: Keaton claimed the title was a reference to the 1907 novel Three Weeks, by Elinor Glyn.
- Thirteen Is Unlucky: The housewarming party is on Friday the 13th.
- Trash the Set
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