Rent Battling Butler (1926)

Silent Comedy. - Battling Butler review by Steve

Moderate Buster Keaton entry which offers decent entertainment, but without any glimpse of the extraordinary. Genre staples are reworked and there are no spectacular stunts. He’s certainly not the first skinny comedian to find himself in the boxing ring with a burly, rowdy thug…

Or the last. Buster plays another rich, oblivious milquetoast. He ventures into the great outdoors to escape his customary luxury, but takes along his super-efficient valet (Snitz Edwards) and all the comforts of home. When he falls for a local girl (Sally O’Neil) the fop has to prove his manliness to her backwoods family.

So he pretends to be Battling Butler (Francis McDonald) a real pugilist in training for a big fight with the Alabama Murderer! And the dilettante learns valuable life lessons, as well as how to fight back. O’Neil brings little to the thankless role of Buster’s love interest, though Mary O’Brien sparks as the actual boxer’s wife.

 In the absence of the expected acrobatics, there’s a moment to appreciate that Buster had a kind of androgynous appeal, and how durable is his impassive-yet-liberated screen image. The modern world is an unfathomable mystery, but he confronts it with an irrational courage. And that’s always worth seeing.