Battling Butler (1926)

A story of a well to do young man, named Alfred Butler, whose father sees him as weak and unskilled so he sends him off to go hunting in hope that he will learn a little more about being a man. That is how Battling Butler begins. Keaton portrays a common stereotype he loved to create of a man that was so well off that he was incapable of normal everyday things. We follow him as he "roughs it" his way, that is with his personal butler and cook in hand is a very large and impressive tent set up. One day he would run into a beautiful mountain girl (Sally O'Neil) and wishes to marry her, but her father (Walter James) is not impressed by how weak he is, until he learns his name if Alfred Butler and confuses him with Alfred "Battling" Butler (Francis McDonald), a very successful up and coming boxer in the news. Seeing the father's acceptance of him after this misconception, he must now convince them that he is the true "Battling" Butler. As chance would have it the two Butlers would meet and the boxer counterpart sets Keaton up to fight his next match for him. There we follow his comedic training for the match, when at the last second the real boxer comes forward and wins the bout, saving Keaton's character from the humiliation. Ultimately "Battling" Butler is not happy with Keaton taking on his persona to impress a girl and begins to fight Keaton in his dressing room. Fighting for the honor of his loved mountain girl Keaton finds the strength within him to defeat this newly crowned champion and wins over the girl and his family.

Battling Butler was a fun film, and though it did not have a big stunts that Keaton was known for it did showcase the athlete that Buster truly was. His common gags of a well to do man with complete lack of understanding of how the real world works was a perfect setting for Keaton, that is way we see him go to well more than once. But here we see how creative Keaton can be by putting his character in situations and saying "know how are you going to get out of this?" This Keaton film lacks the overall creative punch that we see in some of his work. Though produced by his long time production colleague Joseph M. Schenck, it would be distributed by the growing mega-studio MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), a studio that had grown together out of three studios merged together in the mid 20s. With lack of complete creative production control that he was most comfortable with, he still had ultimate say in his picture and produced a fun one for audiences to watch.

This film would in a way mark a downhill point in Keaton's career as he was displeased with MGM and eventually signed a short contract with Chaplin's United Artists, he would one day return to MGM for a full contract, losing a piece of his creativity in the process, but that would come after his peak in filmmaking with the future masterpiece The General. Change was on the horizon for Keaton. He still was the lovable man in the straw hat that made everyone laugh, but he could see his independent days were numbered and would do his best in the coming couple of years to produce some of the most entertaining and dazzling movies he would produce, before the big change in Hollywood that was to come. Keaton was a frustrated filmmaker, but a very funny and entertaining one.