April Antics: Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle & Buster Keaton

This month we are watching short comedies. Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and Buster Keaton worked together under Arbuckle's company Comique, making 14 shorts together. We watched three.

The Rough House (1917)

RODNEY BOWCOCK: The Roughs live in a seaside resort where Mr. Rough has to contend with setting the bed on fire, servants that are vying for the attentions of the maid and preparing dinner for some illustrious guests that may not be whom they seem to be. Seriously, writing plot descriptions for early silent comedies is a peculiar art indeed. Is what I described even enough plot to fill 22 minutes of screentime? While it may not seem like it from what I’ve just put forward, indeed it is.

SAMANTHA GLASSER: The action of the film begins right away as we see Arbuckle waking up in bed with a fire smoldering on a newspaper on the floor. His casual reaction to the growing fire elicited a big guffaw from me. From there, chaos begins and only accelerates as the film goes on. This short has a frantic pace more reminiscent of Keystone Cops comedies than the slower, more deliberate style of Arbuckle and Keaton. There are chases and people leaping off of cliffs and gunfire galore. The actors jump into a scene and vanish through the use of reverse action photography. We don't really get a sense of who the people are in the house. Is Arbuckle the husband or the son of the rich matriarch? It doesn't matter. Fast and hard laughs are all these filmmakers care about.

RB: At least according to a couple of sources on the internet, Arbuckle is the patriarch of the house which is also populated by his wife and mother-in-law. But to your point, I saw no real indication of that in the film at all. As you said, anything like that seems secondary to having as many gags as possible crammed into the film.

SG: Arbuckle does a quick and less memorable dance of the bread rolls, the definitive version being the one in Chaplin's The Gold Rush.

RB: Of course, this predates The Gold Rush by nearly eight years. Which makes me wonder, was this a fairly well known routine, perhaps from vaudeville and we’ve just grown to associate it completely with Chaplin? Oftentimes when exploring cinema of this era, I find myself with more questions than I have answers to.

SG: If I recall correctly, Chaplin saw Arbuckle do it in a social setting and thought it was amusing so he used it. I remember this example being used to illustrate that if you continue to study film, you'll discover that the first to do something isn't the first at all. The first time I saw this gag was in 1993's Benny and Joon. Had I not ventured backward, I might have thought that was the first instance.

Arbuckle liked using Keaton in his films because they were friends. They were known to hang out together after a long day of shooting, and they loved to play pranks. Keaton's role is minor here and he doesn't show indication of becoming the great icon we know him to be today.

RB: I’m pretty uneducated when it comes to some eras of film and had never seen any of these shorts before. I think I had expected Fatty and Buster to interact more along the lines of many of the comedy teams that I’m much more familiar with, but that really isn’t the case here at all. While they do share some scenes together, most of their business has little to do with each other.

SG: The manic pace of the action got tiresome the more I watched, but there are some great gags in this film. Three stars.

RB: If I’m thinking about this objectively, this certainly has more plot and less of a frantic tone than, say, a Keystone comedy. But it’s also shocking to think about the strides that were being made in short comedies and what they’d be able to experience in just a few short years. Three stars.

The Hayseed (1919)

RB: In a small rural town, Fatty is the mailman. Buster runs the general store. While Fatty is out delivering the mail (and playing a game of Hide and Seek with his girlfriend, Molly Malone), Buster gets into a tiff with the local constable who then steals money from an insured letter in order to buy a ring for Molly. Fatty orders a ring himself for Molly through a mail-order catalog, and from here the action moves to a town dance where Fatty eats a bunch of onions for strength.

SG: Keaton has more to do in this short, getting laughs as he drops loads of water on his rival on the ground.

RB: We definitely see some glimpses of Buster acting like the Buster that we are familiar with. But as with the last short, the individual scenes barely add up to anything exhibiting a coherent plot.

SG: I thought it was funny that when Arbuckle's custom suit arrived, it was still too tight, emphasizing his weight.

RB: Trade ads at the time capitalized on the humanity of Arbuckle. “HE’S HUMAN!” they proclaim, perhaps attempting to showcase his more gentle, less cartoonish style of comedy when compared to the likes of, say, Harold Lloyd, known for his stunt work more than his humor.

SG: Keaton biographer Marion Meade said, "The clunky story has no surprises, the fight scenes lack Arbuckle's frantic energy, and there are no interesting effects. Even Keaton's performance as a bumpkin grocery store clerk is perfunctory."

Wid's Daily wrote, "He gets in a lot of original business and his supporting company headed by Buster Keaton and Molly Malone works like a smooth machine in helping along the comedy tricks."

Photoplay's reviewer Burns Mantle praised Arbuckle's films, saying they are never boring. "You may not believe that eating an onion — to the distress of all your relatives, friends, and your best girl, is such a funny proceeding — but you should see Roscoe, suspected of some petty misdemeanor or other, turn in despair from one to another of his supports while they turn away from him, with even his dog Luke sharing the general disapproval."

Laurence Reid for Motion Picture News said, "There is a laugh in every turn of the camera and what is more it is not gained by slapstick methods. Every player works quietly but scores his points beyond a doubt... The Hayseed will make an undertaker laugh and bring chuckles from a grouch. It is good enough to be featured."

RB: I don’t think it would be possible to really understate the popularity of Arbuckle during this time, especially in small towns and rural areas. These are comedies set in towns that looked like the towns in which many of the viewers lived, which I’m sure really added to their charm.

SG: The fiddle music on the Kino Keaton shorts set calls a lot of attention to itself, sometimes to the detriment of the comedy, but it adds a quaintness to the action on screen.

RB: The score on the release that I watched seemed to actually draw attention to itself vs what was happening on the screen, and while I don’t particularly wish to call it out, I will say that it seems that you had a better experience than I did.

SG: One theater in Salmon, Idaho played the short with Mrs. Temple's Telegram; Philip Rand called it, "A dandy comedy. This combination is good for the hard boiled."

This short was the most mundane of the three we watched, but it also had the most interesting plot. Three stars.

RB: I’ll also say three stars. It seems that we’re starting to get somewhere with these.

The Garage (1920)

RB: Well, this time around Buster and Fatty run a combination garage and volunteer fire station. First they get involved with some business while attempting to clean a car, and then they get sent on a false fire alarm only to discover that their own building is on fire.

SG: It is amazing how much real destruction happened in the name of short comedy.

A theater in Carleton, Nebraska played this short with The Hayseed and said, "Kids liked 'em fine and old folks glad to find the excuse of bringing in the kids to it to see the fool stunts themselves."

RB: At the Picture Show, our trio of Keaton shorts are based around the notion that they can be combined together to create a loosely themed feature. I wonder if the Nebraska theater owner had similar ideas regarding The Garage and The Hayseed?

SG: The boys find a way to completely disrupt the expectations of running a garage, from using a fancy turntable for vehicles as a treadmill to splattering grease absolutely everywhere (and then trying to wipe it off with a tiny useless rag), the kind of anarchy we expect in classic comedies is running on all cylinders. (See what I did there?)

RB: There’s a lot of fun slapstick here, which makes me suspect that this may be a natural for kids that are just starting to be exposed to the fun of silent comedy. In some ways, it’s unfortunate that this was the last official pairing of the two stars, although we know that in many ways there was much bigger things to come, for at least Keaton. Much of Arbuckle’s work after this time should be reappraised and reconsidered by those far more scholarly than I.

SG: Unfortunately the scandal that destroyed Arbuckle's career was looming in the near future.

Marion Meade said, "While the picture is full of delicious Keaton humor, his own acting talent is wasted. Arbuckle was the star, and Keaton could never be anything more than a second banana." He would soon branch off and begin making his own comedies, several of which we hope you will enjoy with us at the Picture Show on Saturday morning.

Of these three, The Garage was my favorite. It had a nice combination of big action combined with smaller, more thoughtful moments. I found the bit with Keaton losing his pants and using a Harry Lauder billboard to hide his shame to be very entertaining and memorable. (By the way, I have his version of "Loch Lomond" on a record and it is very moving. Take a listen.)

Three stars.

RB: This was without question my favorite of the three, although I did enjoy them all to one degree or another. Like you, it still doesn’t rise above three star status, but it’s a fun short with some engaging characters and antics.