The Electric House Review- By Michael Carlisle

Title: The Electric House
Year: 1922
Director: Buster Keaton
Country: US

Coming from a background of vaudeville, Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton entered the film industry in early 1917. Despite a meeting with popular comedian "Fatty" Arbuckle, Keaton had reservations about the medium, mainly because he did not have much knowledge about the technical aspects of making a film. One day he took a camera back to his hotel room, dismantled and reassembled it. With this rough understanding of the mechanics of the moving pictures, he returned the next day, camera in hand, asking for work. He appeared in a total of 14 Arbuckle shorts. After Keaton's successful work with Arbuckle, Joseph M. Schenck gave him his own production unit, Buster Keaton Comedies. It was this unit that allowed him to make The Electric House. 

Botany major Buster mistakenly graduates in electrical engineering and is hired to wire a new home. He installs lots of fanciful gadgets. The engineer who should have received the degree gets even by rewiring all the gadgets to wreak havoc. 
  
The Electric House was written and directed by Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline.  It finds Buster once again manipulating, and being maniplulated by,  his surroundings. This is a showcase for Keaton's curiosity and love of mechanical devices. It's a very inventive short; Keaton was such a perfectionist that he decided to shoot the film twice. He broke his ankle filming the escalator scene in 1921, and put the film on hold.  When he returned to it the next year, he scrapped everything he had filmed the first time and started completely over again. Unfortunately, the first version of the film is now considered lost.

Keaton is a master at using his surroundings to make a memorable gag. Although The Electric House suffers from making most of the jokes centered around the gadgets, lacking a human element that his later films would exploit. There is no character development to speak of and there's no real indication to why Keaton would put himself through all this havoc. I understand the message; reliance on technology makes fools of us all, but there are many pictures before and after that dissect the theme better.

In every Keaton short there is something to enjoy, certainly the escalator gags are hilarious. The Electric House inspired those automated Houses of Tomorrow cartoons that were popular in the 1950s and many more "futuristic" cartoons. Though the film is not perfect, it does contain a glimpse of Keaton genius. 3/5