Moonshine (1918)

Only fragments exist in good quality for this short – on The Best Arbuckle-Keaton Collection DVD, Moonshine clocks in at just under six-and-a-half minutes, and that includes extra narration to bridge some of the gaps.  However, there are several complete versions of the short that can be found on YouTube, albeit of dubious picture quality.

Fatty and Buster play a pair of revenue agents trying to round up bootleggers.  Fatty catches the eye of the chief bootlegger’s daughter (Alice Lake,) and Fatty’s spurned would-be rival, another bootlegger played by Al St. John, handles his rejection about as well as you’d expect of a skeevy criminal in a silent comedy shot.  Chases, hijinks, and threats of violence ensue.

In my rewatch of the Fatty Arbuckle stuff, this might be the best appearance I’ve seen by Alice Lake so far.  She’s given some great slapstick bits to work with, kicking Al St. John in the face, in the butt, and into a hammock with aplomb and gumption.  Unfortunately, her character is majorly jacked-up from a gender perspective.  There’s a weird sequence in which 1) Alice rejects Al in no uncertain terms, 2) her father spanks her for it, 3) Fatty swoops in to breaking up the spanking because he wants to 4) scold her for not having obeyed her father before 5) throwing her in the river, and 6) Alice falls in love with him as a result.  Say what now?  I know it’s 1918, but yeesh.

That’s the only major misstep in this good-not-great short that has some fun humor and some fine slapstick.  Comedy-wise, what stands out most here is the frequent, blatant fourth-wall-breaking.  I know Fatty shoots looks at the camera often enough, and there’s that bit in Coney Island where he motions for the camera to only film him from the waist up while he’s changing, but this is a whole different beast.  The dialogue and intertitles are full of meta comments, such as Fatty and Buster discussing the whereabouts of their extras, the narration pointing out the director’s ingenuity in choice bits, and, in the case of the weird interplay between Fatty and Alice, the observation, “Look, this is only a two-reeler.  We don’t have time to build up to love scenes.”  This isn’t something you see in the early Arbuckle-Keaton shorts, and I don’t remember anything like it in the later ones.  I wonder what prompted it (on an interesting note, the good-quality fragmentary version of the short doesn’t even hint at this sensibility.)

But for goodness sake, let’s talk about Buster already.  Lots of fun here.  In the short’s most memorable sequence, Fatty washes Buster in the river and hangs him up to dry in a tree, upside-down by his ankles.  From what I can tell, there’s nothing holding Buster in place – I think he really is just clinging to a tree branch by the tops of his feet, and the easy way with which he pulls himself up by his pant legs once he “dries off” is terrific to watch.  He also gets a head start on the monkey impression he’ll pull out in The Playhouse, and an excellent chase scene with Al St. John sends both of them up and down a tree, moving nearly in tandem throughout the long single take.

Warnings

Slapstick violence (including gunplay,) drinking, and some weird gender politics.