Buster Keaton's first feature film. He chose to construct the film as a series of separate episodes so the film could be cut into individual shorts to be re-released on their own if the feature was a failure.
A widely-circulated error credits Oliver Hardy for this film. He was not in it. It was the similar-looking rotund comic Kewpie Morgan.
The most famous stunt in the movie was actually built around what went wrong with the original stunt. Keaton intended to leap from a board projecting from one building onto the roof of another building, but he fell short, smashing into the brick wall and falling into a net off-screen. He was injured badly enough to be laid up for three days. But when he saw the film (his camera operators were instructed to always keep filming, no matter what happened), he not only kept the mishap, he built on it, adding the fall through three awnings, the loose downspout that propels him into the firehouse, and the slide down the fire pole.
There are two references in the Roman section a - one classical and one biblical. The classical reference is to the story of Androcles and the lion (when Keaton is in the dungeon) and the biblical one is to Samson bringing down the temple upon himself and his enemies (when Keaton collapses Beery's house).
Towards the end of the movie, the names Havez, Mitchell and Bruckman appear on the football roster; they were names of Keaton's co-writers.