General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

One Week (1920 film)

One Week is a 1920 American silent two-reel (silent short film of about 20 minutes, two film reels) comedy directed by Buster Keaton and Eddie Cline, in which a newlywed couple receives a build-it-yourself prefabricated house as a wedding gift and spends a week assembling it while a rejected suitor secretly renumbers the packing crates¹. It was the first of Keaton's independently produced shorts to be released, and it launched the series of short comedies on which his reputation as a filmmaker was built².

Key fact	Detail
Release	September 1, 1920 (trade-press date; Metro's date may have been September 7, and Cohen Media Group lists August 29)¹^•³^•⁴
Production	Comique Film Corporation; produced by Joseph M. Schenck; distributed by Metro Pictures Corporation³
Key credits	Scenario by Keaton and Cline; cinematography by Elgin Lessley; technical direction by Fred Gabourie³
Cast	Buster Keaton (the Groom), Sybil Seely (the Bride), Joe Roberts (the piano mover), and an unidentified actor as Handy Hank, the vengeful would-be suitor³
Length	Two reels; surviving versions run from about 19 to 25 minutes¹^•⁵
Recognition	Added to the National Film Registry in 2008; in the US public domain¹

Spoilers

Story and inspiration

The plot came from Home Made (1919), a Ford Motor Company industrial film in the Ford Educational Weekly series that explained prefabricated homes, which buyers assembled themselves from instructions; film historian Kevin Brownlow traced the connection²^•⁶. Sears, Roebuck and Co. had been selling prefab homes since 1908, and by the 1920s the prefab trend had reached a high point². Architectural scholars have read the film as a commentary on catalog housing: it depicts the seven-day construction of a Sears-style mail-order Modern Home with pre-cut, fitted pieces, executed not as a sequential process but as a chain of accidents⁸.

In the film, the Groom and Bride receive the portable house as a wedding present. While Keaton is distracted, the wife's jealous ex-beau, Handy Hank, changes the numbers on the crates. Following the printed instructions faithfully, Keaton assembles an asymmetrical house with doors that open into midair and walls that pivot like a seesaw². The couple survives a storm in which the lopsided house spins around, then learns from a city official that it stands on the wrong lot; moving it across town ends with the house stuck on railroad tracks and demolished by a train, after which Keaton posts a For Sale sign that includes the directions²^•⁹.

Production background

Keaton had learned film comedy as Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's sidekick in a series of one-reelers. After military service in 1918 he returned to find Arbuckle leaving the Comique Film Corporation for Paramount, and producer Joseph M. Schenck offered Comique to Keaton, with Metro Pictures agreeing to release eight Keaton shorts a year⁶. Keaton took over the studio along with Arbuckle's staff, including cinematographer Elgin Lessley and special-effects man Fred Gabourie, and hired Eddie Cline, a former Mack Sennett comedian, as co-director; Cline received co-directing credit on sixteen of Keaton's nineteen shorts⁶.

A shelved debut. The High Sign was actually the first film Keaton made with his own production company, but he was dissatisfied with it, judging that it merely transferred stage-style material to the screen, and he shelved it; it was released in 1921¹^•⁶. One Week therefore became his first independent release⁷. Over the following years Keaton made nineteen shorts and several features for Schenck between 1920 and 1928, with complete creative control².

Gags and stunts

The film contains several stunts that Keaton later reworked. The opening is a trajectory gag in which the couple switches between two moving cars; Keaton straddles the two vehicles, a motorcycle passes between his legs, and he drops onto its handlebars before both are thrown into the street. This sequence was altered and expanded for Sherlock, Jr. (1924)². A wall of the house falls onto Keaton, who is saved by an open second-story window, a gag resurrected from the Arbuckle short Back Stage (1919) and staged again, more memorably, in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)⁶. It was the first time in one of his own films that Keaton used the falling house front¹.

Real stunts, real costs. The stunts were performed without doubles or camera tricks⁹. For the storm scene the full-size house, not a model, was built on a turntable so the structure could spin like a top¹^•². Keaton's two-story fall onto his back swelled his arms, elbows, and back; his unit's physical trainer treated him with alternating hot and cold showers and horse liniment, and he worked the next day¹.

The finale depends on camera placement. The house sits on a railroad track; one train misses, and only when the audience relaxes does a second train, kept outside the frame, enter and demolish the house in one motion¹⁰. The film also includes the celebrated bath sequence, in which the Bride drops a soap that bounces across the floor, and which ends with her looking directly at the camera before a hand covers the lens²^•¹¹.

Reception and legacy

The film received excellent reviews after its release following Labor Day, with one newspaper calling it "the comedy sensation of the year"⁶. According to Kevin Brownlow, One Week, the earliest of the shorts to reach theaters, "set the style for all the future Keatons": it began with a gag sequence, slowly escalated, reached a frantic peak, and then let the closing sequence top that peak¹². The film critic Walter Kerr, in his book The Silent Clowns, wrote that coming upon One Week after dozens of period short comedies was "to see the one thing no man ever sees: a garden at the moment of blooming"¹.

The success of One Week shaped Keaton's subsequent career. In later shorts he assembled a stock company, with Joe Roberts as the heavy and Sybil Seely as the ingénue in two more films before she was replaced by Virginia Fox, and he began considering the feature format, tried experimentally with Three Ages (1923)⁶. The Library of Congress National Film Registry added the film in 2008¹.

Preservation and availability

A 35mm print exists in the film holdings of Cohen Media Group, from the Raymond Rohauer collection, and the film is in the US public domain³. It has been restored more than once: Lobster Films restored it in collaboration with Blackhawk Films from two 35mm safety dupe negatives, and Cineteca di Bologna restored it at the L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in association with the Cohen Film Collection¹³^•⁴. Because it is in the public domain, it is freely available on many video-sharing sites¹⁰.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026