The Cook (1918)

The Cook isn’t in The Best Arbuckle-Keaton Collection because, when that DVD came out in 2001, the short was still believed to be lost.  Fortunately, the majority of the film has since been rediscovered and released on the DVD The Cook and Other Treasures (the missing final scene is described in the intertitles.)  This one is just so much fun.

Almost entirely plotless.  Fatty works as the cook at the Bull Pup Café, where Buster is the waiter, Alice Lake is the cashier, and Fatty’s dog Luke is the bouncer.  The assorted restaurant gags are broken up on occasion by Al St. John, playing a literal tough customer who’s taken an unsavory shine to Alice.

I don’t care that the storyline is basically “Storyline – what’s that?”  This short is delightful, up to its ears in fabulous gags and fantastic comic sequences.  I love the juggling sensibilities Fatty brings to cooking (flipping pancakes between two different pans and off his shoe is especially fun,) as well as his fancy knifework.  I love that he has one enormous vat from which he gets everything from sliced ham to ice cream to coffee.  I love absolutely everything about the spaghetti scene, which is a comic master class in dreaming up numerous gags from a single prop.  Fatty wrapping individual strands of spaghetti around his finger before eating them is fun, as is the sight gag of him trying to knit his spaghetti.

Buster is no slouch in that scene, either.  Completely flummoxed by his spaghetti, he variously uses a straight edge razor, a teacup, and a pair of scissors to try to eat it.  Really, Buster is great throughout the short.  The running gag of him catching every dish Fatty tosses through the air to him – including, among other things, a bowl of soup and a glass of milk – is terrific.  He helps kick off this amazing dance sequence that comes out of nowhere and has nothing to do with anything, but it’s just wonderful.  I don’t even know where some of his dance moves come from; they do notlook like 1918, I know that much.  The man was a class unto himself.

He feels really Busterish here, closer to his persona in his own films.  Something about the combination between supremely athletic/suave and hopeless clumsy.  He has all sorts of funny little bits of business, and he also takes his patented Buster Keaton Soulful Eyes out for a test drive with Alice Lake and another woman in the short.

The stuff with Al St. John isn’t as good, except when he’s being chased by Luke.  Watching that dog climb ladders never gets old for me, and I get a kick out the scene where Al is spinning around in circles with Luke’s teeth clamped on the seat of his pants.

And in the “there’s cartoon gags, and then there’s just crazy” category, we have Fatty accidentally bringing a meat cleaver down on Buster’s neck.  Yes, there’s the amusing bit afterwards in which he verifies that Buster’s head is still attached, but that is absolutely ridiculous.

Warnings

Slapstick violence, drinking, and an attempted abduction.

Good Night, Nurse! (1918)

This Fatty Arbuckle short is so-so to me.  It has a few standout bits, but it’s pretty meandering and for the most part doesn’t take advantage of the comic interplay between Fatty and Buster.

After what is evidently a fairly typical night on the town, Fatty is sent to a sanitarium by his wife, who’s been promised that a doctor there can perform an operation to cure Fatty of the Evils of Drink.  As you can imagine, Fatty’s not down with this, but he softens up considerably when he meets a comely young woman of undetermined sanity (Alice Lake.)  Alice begs Fatty to help her escape the hospital, and, evading the doctor and his assistant – played by Buster and Al St. John – Fatty tries to get them both out.

Even though the plot is more defined than the usual “place Fatty, Buster, and Al in a [insert setting here], let hijinks ensure” storytelling, the short as a whole still feels less cohesive than some of the better “play around and get into trouble” shorts like Coney Island or The Bell Boy.  A lot of the gags and comic sequences aren’t as sharp as usual, although there are still some good bits – I enjoy Fatty’s clever work-around for lighting a cigarette in the pouring rain, and it’s fun to see Fatty dance.

As the doctor, Buster is an opposing force for Fatty, and it seems the best of their collaborations always put them on the same side.  They can still play off of each other this way, but it creates a different comedic sensibility that, in my opinion, isn’t as funny as watching Fatty and Buster against the world.  However, that’s not to say Buster isn’t funny.  I love the sight gag of his first appearance – entering the hospital lobby in a blood-spattered coat and sharpening a cleaver – he has an amusing scene with Alice Lake, and he and Al St. John work well together here.

The short’s most memorable scene is a fun bit in which Fatty, dressed as a nurse to facilitate his escape, attracts the attentions of a smitten Buster.  It amuses me that whenever Fatty gets himself into these situations when he’s in drag, it never bothers him.  If anything, he’s the one who starts the flirting, making eyes at Buster (part of his cover?  Trying to throw Buster off his guard?  Practical joke?  Who knows why?)  At any rate, they both flirt with the adorable bashfulness of lovestruck 4-year-olds until Fatty gets a little too emphatic with the playful shoving. 

On a side note, Buster has a second role early in the short playing a bit part.  In the midst of gusting rain storm, he appears as a woman with an umbrella struggling against the wind.  I enjoy this bit because it’s so unlike all the drag humor in the Fatty Arbuckle shorts.  Although it’s a funny scene, what with the woman falling down all over the place and her skirts blowing everywhere, the fact that it’s Buster in the role isn’t played for laughs.  In fact, you’re not supposed to notice that it’s him – his face is pretty well obscured by a wig, a kerchief, and the umbrella.  Instead it’s just a bit of silent comedy ingenuity.  Hard time finding an actress to do some decently rough stunts?  No problem!  Slap a skirt and a wig on your comic partner, and you’re good to go!

Warnings

Slapstick violence and one shot of cartoony gore.

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.

The Bell Boy (1918)

This is probably my favorite of the Fatty Arbuckle shorts.  Lots of laughs, superb comic chemistry, and one of my favorite Buster action bits of all time.  The story’s barely there, but everything else is firing on every cylinder.

Fatty and Buster are bellboys at the Elk’s Head Hotel (“third-class service, first-class prices.”)  They by turns perform, avoid, and fake their work, trying to stay one step ahead of the desk clerk (Al St. John) and causing havoc among the guests.  A lovely manicurist (Alice Lake) books a room, and while Fatty, Buster, and Al all fall for her, it’s naturally Fatty who falls hardest.

Where to begin?  Such fun and creative gags.  Everything involving the horse-powered elevator (yeah – you heard me) is hilarious, and I love seeing the first recorded example of Buster’s classic glass-cleaning bit – so simple, but done so well.  I also like the interlude of Fatty, doing double duty as the hotel barber, remaking a particularly hirsute guest into Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, and Kaiser Wilhelm in turn (the last impression prompts him to start pummeling the guest with shaving cream.)  In 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm is obviously a timely reference – in another gag, a sign in the dining room reads “French and German cooking,” and it won’t be too long after this that Buster is drafted and the Arbuckle-Keaton partnership is temporarily put on hold – but it strikes me that older moviegoers at the time would probably have actually remembered the Lincoln and Grant presidencies as well, as opposed to just being figures from the history books.  Oh yeah, and there’s a brief appearance by Joe Keaton as one of the hotel guests, kicking Buster’s butt (naturally!)

There’s one bit that really threw me the first time I saw it.  The hirsute guest mentioned above initially freaks Fatty and Buster out, bearing a certain resemblance to the devil, but they both calm down when he breaks into flamboyant mannerisms – Fatty actually nudges Buster and flaps his arms, a presumed stand-in for the word “fairy.”  Stuff in pre-Code-era cinema can really catch me offguard sometimes, and I wasn’t expecting that at all.  On the plus side, neither Fatty nor Buster seem hostile toward the guest, but they definitely make fun of them.

This is the first of the Fatty Arbuckle shorts where Fatty and Buster seem like a proper comedy duo, a la Abbott & Costello, Fry & Laurie, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, etc.  In previous films, Buster’s been a bit player, a romantic rival, or just not quite simpatico with Fatty (Out West is close, but since Buster is technically Fatty’s boss there, the dynamic is different.)  Here, they’re two working stiffs clowning around together, and although Buster makes eyes as Alice too, he doesn’t try to “steal” her once she starts leaning toward Fatty.  They play so well off each other.

And Buster himself is terrific.  As usual, he’s great with little touches, like kicking the mop upright, and he has a few really standout sequences.  The whole elevator thing is lots of fun, as is his scene with Joe, and I’ve raved beforeabout how amazing his parkour-esque moves are in the scene with the bank robbers – absolutely incredible.

Warnings

Slapstick violence and a few unexpected gay jokes.

Out West (1918)

 

I really like this one, a fun slapstick western with some terrific gags.  It has its definite imperfections, but overall, it’s one of my favorites of the Fatty Arbuckle shorts.

Fatty, a drifter, rides the rails into a rough ‘n’ tumble town in the Wild West.  He gets a job at the local saloon, run by Buster, and the booze-slinging makes it a bit awkward when he falls in love with a temperance advocate (Alice Lake.)  However, ideological difference don’t matter much when outlaw Al St. John moseys in.  He runs off with Alice, and it’s up to Fatty and Buster to save her.

Just great fun.  The plot is pretty slapdash, particularly in the last act, but the comedy keeps the short moving along well.  Things get off to an excellent start with a series of fine train gags.  (Now, I don’t want to go straight to the “I bet Buster made up this gag” well every time I come across something especially funny in a Fatty Arbuckle short, but come on – intricate circular gags on a train just scream Buster.  I would need pretty empirical evidence before I could entertain the possibility that anyone else came up with that sequence.)  There’s also lots of laughs involving a trap door, and a drunk horse whose performance has to be seen to be believed.  Seriously, not even the fashionista horse from The Blacksmithis as good as this one.

On the not-so-good side, I’m perplexed at the film’s apparent understanding of dangerous weapons.  Whereas people are merely threatened by guns and knives in The Rough House, multiple characters – Fatty included – get shot by both bullets and arrows in this short, to little ill effect.  I get the sense that the general rule is thought to be, “If you’re shot in the butt, it doesn’t count.”  I know these shorts are big on cartoon gags, but that’s just silly.  More unfortunate are the unpleasant moments of racial humor.  There’s a short sequence where Fatty is being pursued by Native Americans who evidently want to eat(!) him, and Alice Lake’s character is introduced rescuing a Black man that the saloon folk are repeatedly shooting at to amuse themselves.  The setup itself is of course horrible, and it’s an additional dose of unsettling to see him falling at the feet of his White Savior, big glycerine tears of gratitude streaming down his face.  Not cool.

But then there’s Buster.  Pretty much the fully-established Stone Face we know and love, running a Wild West saloon with the panache that only Buster can pull off.  So many great gags around his character.  I like that he uses his liquor as a cure-all, he deploys that trap door like nobody’s business, and he clings to a light fixture.  It’s great to see him slightly concerned but basically unruffled in the face of obvious danger.  I don’t even know how this worked with the deadpan, but nobody gave reaction shots like Buster.  He’s stoic, clever, athletic, and makes no bones about confronting people much bigger than he is – what more could you want?

Warnings

Slapstick violence (including gunplay,) drinking, and some distasteful racial humor.