Seventeen minutes is all Charles Lamont needs to set up a mistaken-identity gag built for Buster Keaton: an ice delivery man courting one woman while unaware she has an identical twin next door.
What is Ditto about?
Buster works the ice route through a quiet residential block and quickly falls for one of his regular customers. What he doesn't know is that she has a twin sister living right next door, and the two young women look — and act — close enough to keep him permanently off balance. Lamont builds the short around Buster's growing confusion as he tries to court one twin while accidentally running into the other, using doorways, deliveries and mistaken greetings to keep the mix-up going. It's a tight, gag-driven short rather than a feature-length romance, built to land its jokes fast and get out before the premise wears thin.
About the cast
Buster Keaton headlines opposite twin performers Gloria Brewster and Barbara Brewster, with Harold Goodwin, Lynton Brent, Al Thompson and Robert Ellsworth rounding out the supporting cast of neighbors and bystanders caught up in the mix-up.
Context & significance
Directed by Charles Lamont, Ditto belongs to the short-form comedy slate that ran alongside feature pictures in 1930s American theaters, built for a single tight premise rather than a full plot. K-Time catalogs the title under Romance and Sci-Fi genre tags, though its engine is a straightforward case of mistaken identity rather than anything speculative; at 17 minutes, it's built to be watched in one sitting. Twin performers built specifically for a double-take premise were a common short-comedy device of the period, giving a small production the kind of physical gag a feature-length picture would otherwise need a full reel to set up. Keaton's presence anchors the short in his broader run of physical comedy from the era, carried by timing rather than dialogue.
Watching Ditto on Ktime
The page itself is free to read; watching Ditto requires a K-Time account login. It streams with a Persian dub on K-Time, and the rest of the interface runs in Farsi for Persian-speaking viewers.