Battling Butler
At some point, I’m going to finally buy Kino’s entire Buster Keaton collection- his collective work means far too much to me not to. But it’s always been prohibitively expensive to do so, so what I don’t already own, I’ve had to watch other ways. “Battling Butler” is one of the few silent features of his I still had not watched, however, so I was anxious to finally see it when one of his films I HAD already seen became unavailable for my Keaton entry in “A Movie a Week.” It was a pure delight to finally see it.
The film, co-written and directed by Keaton while he was still an independent filmmaker, stars the silent clown as Alfred Butler, a young man born with a silver spoon in his mouth to a wealthy family. His parents decide he should be sent camping into the woods so that he can “toughen up,” but we get the impression he and his valet (Snitz Edwards) don’t really understand that concept, as his tent looks like the Weasley’s tent when they go to the Quidditch Cup in “Goblet of Fire.” He tries his hand at hunting and fishing, but the only thing he seems to catch is the eye of The Mountain Girl (Sally O’Neil). He has her over to his camp for dinner, and the affection is mutual. The problem for Alfred, however, comes with the girl’s father and brother, who do not want her marrying a weakling. One morning, his valet sees an article in the paper about an Alfred “Battling” Butler, a lightweight boxer who is moving up the ranks. So, the valet convinces them that Keaton’s Alfred is Battling Butler, but, when the actual Butler finds out, he might have to actually take care of himself inside the ring, and outside of it.
“Battling Butler” finds Keaton very much in the second-tier of his body of work, but I would put it high up in that tier, as he takes his familiar story shape of boy meets girl, falls in love, then must get himself out of a jam to prove his love, and works in some of the most purely physical performance work he ever had to do. You won’t find the elaborate stunts of “The General” or “Our Hospitality” here, but rather, a performance where Keaton throws his body around while Alfred tries to become a boxer in a way he didn’t really do outside of the vaudeville act his family had when he was a kid. This is a relatively straight-faced affair, actually (not largely comedic like his other, better known work), and that’s something I kind of enjoy most about it. It gives Keaton a chance to stretch his storytelling chops beyond just elaborate set pieces, and the result is another easily accessible comedic fable from one of the great artists in movie history. How his work deserves to be discovered by film lovers now.
