One Week



"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.

One Week was added to the National Film Registry in 2008.

This film is in the public domain and can be viewed in its entirety at Google Video.

Has nothing to do with the Barenaked Ladies song.


 * 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
 * "I'll be right down!"
 * The date of the housewarming party (see Thirteen Is Unlucky, below).
 * 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.
 * Physics Goof
 * What Buster can do on a ladder is not impossible, but it's clearly ill advised.
 * The piano possesses Hollywood Density.
 * 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