One Week

Widely considered one of the greatest comedy shorts ever made, One Week was Buster Keaton's first independent release as a director-star. A newlywed couple receives a prefabricated house in a box, with instructions to assemble it in one week. But a jealous rival has tampered with the numbering, and the resulting house is a surreal architectural nightmare—walls where doors should be, stairs leading nowhere, and a facade that defies gravity. The film culminates in one of Keaton's most celebrated sequences: the house, caught in a storm, is swept onto train tracks and demolished by a locomotive. Keaton's engineering genius and deadpan physical comedy are on full display in every frame. The film was selected for the National Film Registry in 2008. The film is in the public domain.