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 a 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" provides examples of:
- 6 Is 9:
- After all their labor building the house, they find out that the Lot 99 sign actually meant Lot 66, so they have to move the house.
- The malicious character Handy Hank repaints the numbers on the crates (3 becomes 8, 1 becomes 4) so the home building would result in an Epic Fail.
- 13 Is Unlucky: The housewarming party is on Friday the 13th.
- Agony of the Feet: Sybil stamps her foot ... onto her other foot, and makes the classic one-foot hopping exit.
- The Alleged House: What the do-it-yourself home becomes thanks to Handy Hank's sabotage and the newlyweds' bumbling.
- Angry Fist-Shake: Handy Hank performs one after Buster's chair pulling prank.
- Amusing Injuries: As one would expect from slapstick comedy involving hand tools.
- Anvil on Head: Buster is repeatedly flattened by a piano.
- Artistic License – Physics:
- What Buster can do on a ladder is not impossible, but it's clearly ill advised.
- The piano possesses Hollywood density.
- Bizarrchitecture: The weird, twisted house that Buster builds after the numbers are changed.
- 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 exchange places.
- The kitchen sink is on a rotating wall.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall / Film the Hand: Buster's wife is taking a bath when she drops the soap out of the bathtub. A hand then covers the camera while she retrieves the soap. After she's back in the tub, the hand goes away, and she grins at the camera.
- By Wall That Is Holey: Preceded by a vertical bookcase passage (see above).
- Car Meets House: The final scene... or rather Train Meets House.
- Chase Scene: Unusually brief for a Keaton film. Handy Hank is chasing Buster through the house after the chair pulling prank. It culminates in Buster pulling a Door Judo prank.
- Doom It Yourself: Any halfway competent architect or construction foreman would have realized there was a problem.
- Door Judo: Applied by Buster to get rid of Handy Hank.
- Exploding Calendar: Counting the days in the single week that Buster spends building the house.
- Foreshadowing
- "I'll be right down!"
- The date of the housewarming party (see 13 Is Unlucky, above).
- From Bad to Worse: On top of everything else, they built the house on the wrong lot.
- Green-Eyed Monster: Hank, who changes the numbers on their crates and thus sabotages the house, because he wanted Buster's girl.
- Iris Out: Each chapter starts and ends with an Iris In/Out.
- 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."
- Look Both Ways: The train hitting the house was coming from the other direction.
- 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.
- Railroad Tracks of Doom: At the end, Buster finds out that he built the house on the wrong lot and has to move it. It ends up getting stuck on railroad tracks while a train is coming.
- Double Subversion: The oncoming train takes a parallel track and narrowly misses their house. Buster and Sybil sigh with relief... and then a different train comes from the other direction and smashes the house to kindling.
- Shout-Out: Keaton claimed the title was a reference to the 1907 novel Three Weeks, by Elinor Glyn.
- Trash the Set: The house is demolished by a train in the last scene.
