Film #140 - The Electric House (1922)
Viewed May 20, 2006
A couple of years into Buster Keaton’s series of shorts, The Electric House finds Buster in strong form visually and athletically. Something does suffer, though, as the story is particularly weak.
The plot of this one has Buster accidentally given an electrical engineer’s diploma instead of the one he was supposed to recieve: for botany. As Buster recieves a commission to electrify the house of the girl he loves, though, he is not interested in fixing the situtation.
Most of the film is made up of Buster’s many outrageous inventions that constitute his idea of “electrifying” the house. These include an escalator in place of the central staircase and a bath tub that rolls into the room on rails when wanted. Naturally, these lead to plenty of physical mishaps for Buster and the rest of the cast. When the true electrical engineer tries to ruin Buster’s hopes, things do heat up a bit, but it still ends up being little more than a runaround.
But The Electric House is still an entertaining short. The gags flow virtually nonstop, more than carrying the film through its flimsy narrative. Buster was really coming into his own at this point and would soon move on to greater glory in features, finally using the inventiveness shown here for a much greater cause.