The Life of the Party (Paramount, 1920)

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

After Torch Song Turner Classic Movies did their usual “Silent Sunday Showcase,” featuring two films by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle: the feature-length The Life of the Party (1920) and a Mack Sennett Keystone two-reeler from 1915, Fatty’s Tintype Tangle. The Life of the Party was actually a quite sophisticated farce with a notable anti-capitalist theme. Written by Irwin S. Cobb (who also hosted the first Academy Awards banquet) and directed by Joseph Henabery (who played Abraham Lincoln in D. W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation, in which he was assassinated by fellow future director Raoul Walsh as John Wilkes Booth), The Life of the Party casts Arbuckle as aspiring attorney Algernon Leary. The locale is a fictional city called “Cosmopolis” in which an evil Milk Trust is using gangster-style tactics to drive competing dairies out of business and push up the price of milk to levels that threaten the health of Cosmopolis’s babies. Leary has a big office safe in which he keeps a stash of booze (Prohibition had just come into at least nominal effect when this film was made and many of the liquor bottles still have above-board labels on them) which he and his law partner, Sam Perkins (Roscoe Karns, a marvelous character actor who made the silent-to-sound transition easily and kept working until 1964, six years before his death), imbibe extensively despite the shocked looks of his staff members who keep coming in on him as he’s trying to drink. Leary had previously applied to the Milk Trust to be their attorney. The Trust has already got the local judge, Voris (Frank Campeau) – whose first name keeps changing from “Thomas” to “Frank” and back – in their pocket.

The Milk Trust’s only opponents are a women’s group called the Better Babies Bureau consisting of the usual assortment of dowager widows as well as one attractive young single woman, Millicent Hollister (Viora Daniel), with whom Leary immediately falls in love even though she’s already engaged to Judge Voris. There’s a nice scene showing how good an actor Arbuckle could be when he hesitantly fingers a $5,000 check the Milk Trust’s CEO has sending him as a retainer, then decides that love is better than money and gallantly tears up the Milk Trust’s check to take the side of the Better Babies Bureau against the Trust instead. In his first court appearance before Judge Voris – whom we know, though Leary doesn’t, is in the pocket of the Milk Trust – there’s a surprising dialogue exchange in the intertitles in which Voris asks Leary, “Are you trying to show contempt for this court?” Leary replies, “No, Your Honor. I’m doing my best to hide it” – an exchange I’d always assumed was created by Mae West for one of her films a decade and a half later. Ultimately the Milk Trust decides to run Judge Voris for mayor of Cosmopolis, and the Better Babies Bureau enlists Leary to run as a reform candidate against him. Millicent invites Leary to a weird theme party in which all the guests are supposed to come dressed as children, and he’s worried that if anyone sees him in baby clothes his political career will be ruined by the scandal. It’s a grimly ironic scene given that two years later Arbuckle’s career would abruptly end in scandal following a wild party of his own he hosted in San Francisco which ended in the mysterious death of starlet Virginia Rappé and Arbuckle enduring three trials for her alleged murder. Leary tries to make it home after the party and a hold-up man steals his overcoat, leaving him in the middle of the street in a heavy snowstorm wearing nothing but his Buster Browns. Ultimately Judge Voris withdraws from the mayor’s race for fear of being exposed for his corruption, and Leary is elected and proposes to Millicent – only, unsurprisingly, he’s caught a cold from his walk home in the snowstorm and his marriage proposal is interrupted by fits of sneezing.

The Life of the Party was preserved and restored by the Library of Congress, though the last few feet were missing from the extant print and had to be filled in from still photos taken on set. The Life of the Party is surprising in a number of respects: instead of acting as his own director, as Arbuckle had in most of his shorts for Mack Sennett and Joseph Schenck (in the later series Arbuckle enlisted a supporting player named Joseph “Buster” Keaton, who later said his only lessons in directing had come from watching Arbuckle do it), he was given Joseph Henabery to direct and an elaborate pre-set scenario that left him little room to improvise. The Life of the Party is essentially a Frank Capra movie almost two decades early (remember that Capra got his start as a gag man for Sennett and knew Arbuckle; in later years Capra said he admired Arbuckle for being ambidextrous and being able to throw pies in two different directions with each arm). It also breaks with Arbuckle’s usual casting as a working-class man (I’ve noted that the greatest silent comics all seemed to have set themselves up in different niches along America’s class system: Charlie Chaplin as the lower-class “Tramp,” Arbuckle as working-class, Harold Lloyd as middle-class and Keaton as upper-class) in that he’s a legal professional and spent more money than he can afford on an elaborate office as a “front.” Though his shift to feature films under Paramount’s supervision had cost him much of his creative control, Arbuckle is still quite a performer and gets plenty of opportunities for pratfalls. The imdb.com page on The Life of the Party credits Al St. John as Arbuckle’s stunt double, but that’s hard to believe: St. John was a frequent comic villain in Arbuckle’s films for Sennett and Schenck and he was a tall, lanky man who’s hardly likely to have been able to double for the legendarily large Arbuckle, who hated the nickname “Fatty” and whenever he was addressed by it, he’d angrily correct the speaker and say, “I do have a name! It’s Roscoe!” The imdb.com page also quotes a news item from the Spartanburg Herald in Spartanburg, South Carolina from January 1921 that the Rex Theatre was inviting “Fat Folks Free” as a promotion for this movie; they put a scale in the lobby and if you weighed 225 pounds or more, you got to see the movie free.