Battling Butler

Wealthy weakling Alfred Butler's parents think he is too indoorsy, so they have their faithful valet Martin take him on a hunting and fishing trip in the mountains. There he meets a beautiful mountain girl, Sally, and immediately proposes marriage. Her he-man father isn't having any of it, however, and tries to scare Alfred off. In an attempt to save face, Martin tells Sally's father that his charge is really "Battling" Butler, a championship boxer. That conforms to the older man's macho standards, and the happy couple are subsequently married. This all backfires when the real "Battling" Butler comes back into town. As punishment for impersonating him, he forces Alfred to take his place in the ring during a prize fight with "The Alabama Murderer." How can Alfred possibly walk away from this fight without getting pulverized - and even if he does, will Sally ever speak to him again after she finds out the truth?

Even though most true film historians proclaim either Sherlock Jr. (1924) or The General (1927) as his best, Buster Keaton considered Battling Butler his personal favorite of all his movies. This was the rare case when a Keaton movie was based on a stage play - Battling Butler had run on Broadway from October 1923 to July 1924 with Charlie Ruggles (later star of the TV series The Ruggles) in the lead role. For his leading lady this go-around, Keaton picked vivacious Sally O'Neil, who had found Hollywood fame the previous year in her second feature, Sally, Irene and Mary (1925). During the scene in which Keaton proposes marriage to O'Neil, a double had to be used for the close-ups of Buster's hand - Keaton had lost the tip of his right index finger in a childhood accident involving a clothes wringer. Interestingly, when Martin Scorcese was filming Raging Bull (1980), the director considered the climactic boxing scene in Battling Butler his biggest influence, despite the fact that the two films' tones couldn't be more different. Scorcese told an interviewer that Keaton was "the only person who had the right attitude about boxing in the movies." (1926)

Upplagd i sortimentet: 2 januari, 2025