You can probably picture the scene I mean - a wooden house collapses, with the walls falling outwards. The front wall topples towards a man who is standing, oblivious, in the street. It appears he’s going to get flattened, but he’s standing in just the right spot for the windowframe to pass over his head, so he’s left standing in the middle of the horizontal wall section.
What film is that from? I’m thinking possibly Laurel and Hardy…
I’m pretty sure it was originally a Buster Keaton silent movie. The scene has probably been reused since then.
Definitely Buster Keaton - that scene is in my Legends of Comedy set.
I would have thought it was Harold Lloyd.
I thought it was Harold Lloyd also, but it’s apparently Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. I haven’t seen the movie, but I recognize it from Arrested Development’s homage to that scene, where a house falls down around Buster Bluth.
Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Here’s Roger Ebert on the stunt:
Thanks all. IMDB seems to back that up, based on this user comment:
“The part that makes this one of the more memorable silent films of all time is the hurricane segment near the end. There are some amazing scenes in that, including a very famous one in which an entire side of house falls on Buster, who escapes without injury because an open door on the house is exactly where Keaton is standing.”
Edit: Asked, answered and cited in less than 10 minutes flat - gotta love this place 
Lolly, Johnny Knoxville did it in Jackass 2, but first he got crushed under it. 
Strangely enough, the reason I asked this question was that I read an article about Jackass 2 that mentioned that stunt… 
Actually, Buster did it first in the 1920 **One Week** (you can see it here at the 5:00 mark), which is my favorite of all his early comedy shorts. Steamboat Bill Jr. was just a larger, more dangerous version of the same stunt (see it here at the 2:05 mark; pardon the techno music).
It should be noted Jackie Chan did a very good version of the stunt in his film Project A II (it’s the very first shot in this clip).
Buster Keaton and Doctor Who. I think my brain is melting.
When I read the thread title, for some reason Charlie Chaplin’s little tramp immediately came to mind. Did Charlot have a similar scene in one of his films?
Buster Bluth (Tony Hale) reenacts this stunt in the episode “The One Where They Build a House” in Arrested Development.
I’ve seen all his shorts (though admittedly a long time ago), and I don’t remember it ever appearing in them–and if it did, it almost certainly didn’t precede the 1920 BK cite I gave.
I believe Laurel and Hardy did it in one of their shorts as well, though I can’t remember which one. This would have been after Keaton did it anyway, though.
I got that also. A bit disappointing, except for the wonderful Spike Jones “Cocktails for Two” bit.
Quoting Roger Ebert is, frankly, dubious at best. He often gets facts wrong.
He was correct on this one, he can’t miss them all, but I’m just sayin’.
I couldn’t find anything by googling; I thought the same thing as you. As soon as I saw the thread title, in fact.
It is definitely Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill Jr. We have it, along with a dozen or so others of his films, on DVD. But most people don’t realize that this was not his first time to perform that stunt. He did it before in one of his short features a few years before he made Steamboat Bill Jr. It’s only the one in this feature-length film that is always shown.
EDIT: Ah, I see now that Archive Guy also pointed out that it was not Keaton’s first attempt at the stunt. We also have a lot of his short features on DVD, too, including One Week.
Macgyver did it as well, in a movie-themed episode (where Mac also does a knife ride down a movie screen), while rescuing a former silent film star from thugs.
Classic
Si