- Buster Keaton's The Electric House is an entertaining early take on the perils of automation in which a recent graduate in botany (Keaton) electrifies a house in order to impress a girl (Virginia Fox). At first, the girl and her father (Joe Roberts) are wowed by such inventions as the moving staircase, train-delivered meals, and electric swimming pool, but it doesn't take long for things to run amok when the real electrician (Steve Murphy) begins fiddling with the wires. Without going into too much detail, the staircase propels several people out the window, the train derails, and the swimming pool...well, that one works out okay. My favorite scene features Keaton lugging an enormous trunk up a staircase that just won't end. Online sources claim that the extended Keaton family appeared in a prologue, but that must have been trimmed from the version I watched.
