Fatty's Tintype Tangle (Keystone, 1915)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Following The Life of the Party Turner Classic Movies showed a much more typical Arbuckle film: Fatty’s Tintype Tangle, made for Mack Sennett’s Keystone studio in 1915 and casting Arbuckle as a much put-upon husband who gets a continued stream of abuses not only from his wife (Norma Nichols) but his imperious mother-in-law (Mai Wells). He’s driven out of his apartment by these two formidable women and stumbles his way to the local park, where he meets a tintype photographer (Josef Swickard, best known as Rudolph Valentino’s father in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) and a couple from Alaska (Edgar Kennedy and Louise Fazenda, both considerably younger and sexier than we’re used to seeing them). The photographer catches Arbuckle and Fazenda in a pose that makes it look like they’re romantically involved, and of course Kennedy gets inflamed with jealousy and goes after Arbuckle with a gun, shooting at him seemingly at random. (A number of Sennett’s films, including the feature-length Tillie’s Punctured Romance, have this National Rifle Association’s wet dream of a world in which people routinely carry guns around everywhere they go and randomly shoot at each other, albeit without ever actually hurting or wounding anyone.) At the climax, Arbuckle is trapped on a batch of electrical power cords which bounce him up and down. He’s cornered on them because Kennedy is there with his omnipresent guns (and seemingly endless supply of ammunition), ready to slaughter him if he tries to come down. Fatty’s Tintype Tangle is a reliably amusing slapstick fest and also something of a situation comedy; for once the designation “Farce Comedy” on the opening title of a Keystone comedy seems to make sense.