One Week

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Where's Extreme Makeover Home Edition when you need them?

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.

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

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"One Week" provides examples of:

• 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