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Battling Butler | |
---|---|
Directed by | Buster Keaton |
Written by | Al Boasberg Lex Neal Charles Smith Paul Gerard Smith |
Based on | Battling Butler 1922 musical play by Stanley Brightman Austin Melford |
Produced by | Buster Keaton Joseph M. Schenck |
Starring | Buster Keaton Sally O'Neil Walter James |
Cinematography | Bert Haines Devereaux Jennings |
Distributed by | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
Release date |
|
Running time | 71 minutes |
Country | USA |
Languages | Silent film English intertitles |
Battling Butler is a 1926 American comedy silent film directed by and starring Buster Keaton. It is based on the 1923 musical Battling Buttler . The film entered the public domain in 2022. [1]
Alfred Butler is a scion of a wealthy family, but an embarrassment to his father as Alfred is a slight, gentle young man, accustomed to ease and luxury. His father suggests a hunting and fishing trip to toughen him up. Alfred goes on the trip, accompanied by his chauffeur and his personal valet. During the excursion, he falls in love at first sight with a low-class mountain girl who lives with her family in a shack. In order to impress her working-class family, the valet tells them that Alfred is the well-known professional championship fighter who happens to have the same name and fights under the professional sobriquet "Battling Butler". From there, the masquerade must be maintained, in public and in private. When he returns, Alfred is greeted by a cheering crowd of boxing enthusiasts who think that he is the fighter.
Alfred expects that he will have to actually fight one of the Battling Butler's opponents and trains as best he can. On the day of the fight, he reluctantly dons his boxing trunks and gloves, expecting to be badly beaten. To his great relief, the real Battling Butler shows up, fights, and wins.
However, the Battler resents having been impersonated by a feeble milquetoast like Alfred. In the locker room, he starts punching Alfred in the head and body. This continues until Alfred sees that the door of the locker room is open and his beloved is watching. Inspired, he begins fighting back, his confidence and fury increasing with each blow he lands. To everyone's surprise, the beating turns into a real contest, and culminates in a knockout victory for Alfred, who, in a frenzy of unaccustomed blood-lust, continues savaging the unconscious Battler until the Battler's trainer and manager rush in and restrain him. Shocked by his own prowess, he confesses his deception to his beloved. She forgives him, and they celebrate with an evening on the town, Alfred still dressed in his boxing trunks and athletic shoes, but also wearing a top hat and carrying a classy walking stick.
Like Keaton's earlier Seven Chances , the film is an adaption of a stage work. The musical was called Battling Buttler , by Walter L. Rosemont and Ballard MacDonald, and starred Charlie Ruggles on Broadway. It ran from October 8, 1923, to July 5, 1924. [2] The New York Times noted the difference in the spelling of the name of the central character between the stage and film versions. [3]
This film was released for home video by Kino Video in a collection with two Keaton shorts, The Frozen North and The Haunted House .
Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton was an American actor, comedian, and filmmaker. He is best known for his silent film work, in which his trademark was physical comedy accompanied by a stoic, deadpan expression that earned him the nickname "The Great Stone Face". Critic Roger Ebert wrote of Keaton's "extraordinary period from 1920 to 1929" when he "worked without interruption" as having made him "the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies". In 1996, Entertainment Weekly recognized Keaton as the seventh-greatest film director, writing that "More than Chaplin, Keaton understood movies: He knew they consisted of a four-sided frame in which resided a malleable reality off which his persona could bounce. A vaudeville child star, Keaton grew up to be a tinkerer, an athlete, a visual mathematician; his films offer belly laughs of mind-boggling physical invention and a spacey determination that nears philosophical grandeur." In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him as the 21st-greatest male star of classic Hollywood cinema.
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Battling Buttler is a musical in three acts with music by Philip Braham and a book and lyrics by Stanley Brightman, Austin Melford and Douglas Furber, which opened in London in 1922. It was then greatly revised by Walter L. Rosemont (music) and Ballard MacDonald and produced on Broadway in 1923 after tryouts in Detroit and Chicago.