I would rate this below-par for a Buster Keaton short. It's not bad, just not quite up to Buster's wild and craziness he usually exhibits in these short 20-minute films. He set high standards.

Instead of amazing physical feats or a bunch of chase scenes, most of the jokes are either Buster getting a horse dirty or breaking something or someone else doing it, or a nutty invention for a "shock absorber" for riding a horse. They are all mildly amusing, but that's it.

Perhaps part of the problem is that most of the movie takes place in a blacksmith shop/automobile garage. Keaton, with his athletic prowess, needs room to maneuver, and he doesn't have it here.

"The Blacksmith" is probably the closest thing to slapstick I've seen from Keaton as director, and it has all the resultant appeal for me that might be expected; it's intermittently funny, and that's about it... I have to confess a prejudice -- humour that revolves around destruction and mayhem has never really been my cup of tea, and for my money Buster's character here is less appealing than the stoical underdogs he more usually plays; it's a combination of the inept and the sly that I found it hard to warm to.

That said, there are some good gags (as well as a few I simply didn't understand; why was Buster heating his stopped watch in the coals?). I liked the {horse-}shoe fitting, with its parody of a high-class shop, and the moment when Buster reaches out and calmly uses the little boy's helium balloon in lieu of a wheel-jack, continuing his maintenance without pause, is pure Keaton despite the low comedy of its aftermath -- as is the moment when, after struggling in vain to release his trapped foot from the points, oblivious to the threat of the approaching train, he catches sight of the locomotive stopped behind him and is instantly free in one bound of terror.

I didn't really find this the equal of Keaton's other comedy shorts, though. Zany filler, but there's little here that a score of other artists couldn't do as well.

This film bears a strong resemblance to the Keaton/Arbuckle collaboration "The Garage". Here Keaton is the somewhat inept assistant to a bully (Big Joe Roberts) in a garage where he works as a combination blacksmith and auto mechanic. Ordinary props and tools of the trade become instruments of mischief and mayhem, along with some not-so-ordinary devices of Buster's own design.

During this short film he completely wrecks a new Rolls Royce, a car that retailed for ten thousand dollars back in the early 20's. Did the Keaton Studios have the budget for the destruction of such a vehicle? Some have conjectured that this might have been the Rolls Royce that Keaton received as a wedding present from his brother-in-law and benefactor, Joe Schenck. Also conjectured is that the scene where he is shoeing a horse and equating it with trying to sell shoes to a finicky female customer could have been a dig at his new wife's excessive clothes shopping. This film was made about a year after his marriage to Natalie Talmadge - a marriage that even started out on very rocky ground, and these would have been the kind of passive-aggressive stunts that Keaton was well known for.

I'd recommend it.