Battling Butler (Joseph M. Schenck Productions, Buster Keaton Productions, MGM, 1926)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, April 5) the featured film just before Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase”, 1961’s King of Kings, ran so long that by switching channels right after the Lifetime movie ended I was able to catch all of Buster Keaton’s 1926 film Battling Butler. As with the Keaton film two movies earlier in his filmography, Seven Chances, Battling Butler was based on a hit play, a musical by Stanley Brightman and Austin Melford. The credits for the movie Battling Butler list Keaton as sole director (usually he took co-director credit with Eddie Cline or Clyde Bruckman, but on his silent films, at least, he was the auteur) and no fewer than four writers for the “adaptation” of the play: Paul Gerard Smith, Al Boasberg (who worked with Keaton again on his very next film, The General, and also wrote the stateroom scene for the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera), Charles Henry Smith, and Lex Neal. Plot-wise, Battling Butler is the old chestnut about the impossibly spoiled upper-class twit – I’ve long suspected Keaton often cast himself as a rich kid to place himself at the clear other end of the socioeconomic scale from Charlie Chaplin and his lower-class “Tramp” – who falls hard for an unassuming woman who doesn’t buy his superior act. Ultimately, to prove himself worthy of her, he has to climb down off his pedestal and do something butch so he can “become a man.” The film’s opening scenes are in some ways the best: Alfred Butler (Buster Keaton) is told by his father (regrettably unidentified on imdb.com) that he needs to go out to the country and rough it for a while to prove his inner masculinity. Alfred is so ludicrously un-self-reliant he’s dependent on his valet (Snitz Edwards) for everything, including removing his cigarette from his mouth, flicking off its ashes in an ashtray, and then returning it to Alfred’s mouth.

Needless to say, Alfred’s idea of “roughing it” is to set up a huge tent in the middle of the mountain country, equip it with a fancy bed and all modern conveniences, and even mount a radio on one side of the entrance and a record player on the other. Alfred tries to go out hunting, but he can’t see any game to shoot (though we can see plenty of huntable animals, from ducks to deer). When he fires his shotgun he holds it the wrong way around and it tears holes in the handkerchief of “The Mountain Girl” (Sally O’Neil). Needless to say, she’s not happy at having almost been shot by this insufferable upper-class twit. And just in case her disapproval isn’t enough to make the point, Alfred also has to contend with her father (Walter James) and brother (Budd Fine), who make it clear to him that they don’t want a spoiled milquetoast marrying into their family. There’s a great scene in which Alfred invites the girl for dinner, only the table has been mounted on soft soil and it sinks ever lower as the meal progresses to the point where they’re literally trying to eat off ground level. Alas, from there the plot turns into typical rom-com stuff; Alfred learns (from the newspapers being regularly delivered to him even in the middle of the country) that there’s another Alfred Butler (Francis McDonald), a contender for the lightweight boxing championship who’s nicknamed “Battling Butler.” Alfred’s valet hits on the idea of having his Alfred pose as “Battling Butler” and convince the girl and her relatives that he’s really a prizefighter so they’ll let him marry her. The valet assumes that “Battling Butler” will lose his upcoming championship fight and therefore no one will ever hear of him again, but “Battling Butler” actually wins the bout and there’s a great scene in which Alfred and his valet sink lower and lower into their seats in the boxing arena until they’re the only two people left there.

As if that weren’t enough, Alfred and the mountain girl are having a date at an outdoor café when “Battling Butler” shows up with his wife (Mary O’Brien), and the fighter gets jealous when he thinks Alfred has made a pass at his wife. He concocts a scheme to disappear from the next bout, in which he’s supposed to defend his title against a fighter billed as the “Alabama Murderer,” and let Alfred fight in his place. Accordingly both Alfred’s valet and “Battling Butler”’s manager try pathetically to get Alfred in shape for a serious prizefight, while Alfred does things like sneak onto the running board of the car that’s supposed to be pacing him for his road work. On the night of the big fight the real “Battling Butler” turns up and makes quick work of the “Alabama Murderer” – he explains later that they shouldn’t have thought he’d give up a championship bout just to get revenge against Alfred. Then “Battling Butler” picks a fight of his own against Alfred in the dressing room, only Alfred finds his courage and manages to hold his own and keeps pummeling the helpless “Battling Butler” until the real fighter’s manager and trainer pull him off. The final shot shows Alfred, wearing a top hat and carrying a cane but still in his boxer’s shorts, walking the girl for a night on the town. Battling Butler was made at an odd juncture in Keaton’s career; his producer, Joseph M. Schenck, was worried about whether Keaton’s films were getting too adventurous for mass audiences. With Schenck as his business partner, Keaton had made such audacious masterpieces as Our Hospitality, Sherlock, Jr. and The Navigator, but after those Schenck decided that Keaton could best be showcased in adaptations of already popular plays. So he bought the farce Seven Chances, about a man who has to find a willing bride that very day to claim an inheritance, and the film laid an egg in its initial previews. About the only thing the preview audience for Seven Chances found funny was a brief scene in which, fleeing a crowd of women who’ve heard about his situation, he tripped over three rocks. Stuck with an unreleasable movie, Keaton decided to create one of the most audacious and ground-breaking comic sequences of all time. Instead of just three rocks, he’d have his hero threatened with an avalanche of hundreds of rocks (mostly made of papier-machê to make the sequence less risky).

After one more movie, Go West, in which Keaton played a cowboy who leads a herd of cattle through the L.A. streets, Schenck green-lighted Battling Butler as Keaton’s next film – and though it’s cleverly staged, it’s not at the level of his previous masterpieces and one spends much of the movie wondering, “Why did they put Buster Keaton in a rom-com?” Relations between Keaton and Schenck would get even chancier after that; Battling Butler was the last film they would release under MGM’s distribution. Shortly after that Schenck would get an offer to assume the presidency of United Artists, the independent distributor formed by Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford, and he would move the releases of Keaton’s films to United Artists. This happened just when Keaton was at work in Oregon making what’s generally considered his greatest film, The General (1926), based on a real-life drama of the Civil War. He spent over $1 million on it – the most expensive comedy to date – and shot it in Oregon because it was the only place he could find that still ran railroads with the narrow track gauges used during the Civil War. The General was a box-office flop and Schenck then put Keaton into College, a stone ripoff of Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman. After one more independent production, Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), Schenck closed the company he’d run with Keaton and arranged for Keaton to sign directly with MGM, where Schenck’s brother Nicholas was company president. Alas, Nicholas Schenck was based in New York and had nothing to do with the studio’s creative end; the people who did, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, were notoriously intolerant of independent-minded directors like Erich von Stroheim, Josef von Sternberg, Rex Ingram, Maurice Tourneur and Buster Keaton. To add to Keaton’s troubles, just as he was signing on to MGM sound came to motion pictures. Unlike Chaplin, Keaton actually welcomed this, but he’d wanted to use dialogue the way he’d used intertitles in his silents: to set up a basic situation he could then embroider with gags, many of them improvised on the spot. Keaton was also an incipient alcoholic who responded to the strains on his career and his marriage with drink, and a spendthrift who ran through his money almost as fast as he made it. I’ve often thought that if Keaton had been as compulsively frugal as Chaplin and Lloyd, he could have bought out Joseph Schenck’s share in their production company and continued to make his films independently. Be that as it may, Battling Butler is a genuinely amusing film but hardly at the level of the Keaton masterworks on either side of it in his filmography.