Keaton remarked on occasion that Battling Butler was his favorite film; it isn't the favorite of the critics--but it's still Keaton, and very funny. Based on a Broadway play, the story revolves around a case of mistaken identity between two Alfred Butlers--one an effete millionaire (Keaton), the other the heavyweight champion of the world (Francis McDonald). Coincidence brings them to the same backwoods Kentucky neighborhood, where Butler-the-fop finds love with a mountain girl, but not before antagonizing Butler-the-brute into a Madison Square Gardens grudge match. Snitz Edwards is a delight as Keaton's valet. David Robinson writes, “It is markedly thinner in gag invention than the other films...yet the very absence of stronger comic invention at least serves to emphasize the skill Keaton had by this time acquired as metteur-en-scene and film narrator. Always guided by the choice of the most just and effective solution to the demands of the story, feeling no a priori obligation to the then dominant conventions of post-Griffith montage, he is one of the most authoritative and stylistically modern of silent directors.” Pauline Kael notes the use of deep focus camerawork here that was later associated with Welles and Citizen Kane.