Battling Butler

Alfred Butler is a wealthy young man with little experience of hardship, sent by his father to a rural campsite in the hope that rough living will toughen him up. The trip is comfortable rather than testing, but it changes him anyway: he falls for a young woman from a mountain family who see him as soft and idle. His valet notices that a newspaper article describes a well-known boxer who shares Alfred's name, and suggests Alfred pass himself off as that champion. The deception wins the family's approval, but it creates a problem when a real title fight is announced involving the genuine Battling Butler, leaving Alfred obliged to train and appear in the ring.

Buster Keaton directed the film and plays Alfred, with Snitz Edwards as his valet, Sally O'Neil as the mountain girl, Walter James as her father, Budd Fine as her brother, and Francis McDonald as the real boxer. Al Boasberg and Lex Neal wrote the screenplay, and Keaton produced. The film was released in August 1926 and runs seventy-seven minutes. It is the ninth of the thirteen features Keaton directed, arriving between The General and College.

On IMDb the film holds a rating of 7 out of 10 from roughly 4,400 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.7 out of 10 from about 109 votes. Both point to a comedy that has held up reasonably well with viewers, if less widely seen today than some of Keaton's other work.