Jon Mirsalis on Piano Keaton remarked on occasion that Battling Butler was his favorite film; it isn't the favorite of the critics-but it's still 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 notes that "the very absence of stronger comic invention at least serves to emphasize the skill Keaton had by this time acquired as metteur-en-scène 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."