by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I want to comment on a
quite interesting program Turner Classic Movies ran last night as part of their
“Silent Sunday Showcase”: seven films from Mack Sennett’s Keystone studios from
1913 to 1915 featuring Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. Arbuckle was an ex-waiter who’d
scored a modest success in vaudeville — where he met and married his first
wife, Minta Durfee, and made her a partner in his act — until he was scouted by
Sennett, offered a movie contract and became one of the first major comedy
stars. Because of his large size, he was billed as “Fatty” — much to his
dismay; address him as such and he’d throw back, “That’s not my name! It’s Roscoe!” — and though his earlier films were made with
Durfee as his leading lady, Sennett soon decided to pair Arbuckle with
Sennett’s own inamorata, Mabel
Normand, for the popular “Mabel and Fatty” series. The two of them cranked out
films at the usual rapid pace of the day — a one- or two-reeler every two weeks
or so — and soon Arbuckle and Normand both started directing films as well as
appearing in them. In 1917 Arbuckle bolted Sennett and started making films in
New York for something called the Comicque Film Corporation, organized by him
and producer Joseph Schenck, and for their first Comicque film, The Butcher
Boy, Schenck and Arbuckle
stumbled onto another player who’d become a major comedy star, a vaudevillian
who had made his way to the set just to see what movies were all about and
ended up cast in a featured supporting role in the movie: Buster Keaton. In
1919 Paramount, which distributed Comicque’s films, wooed Arbuckle away from
Schenck with the promise of a feature-film contract, and Arbuckle’s star rose —
and abruptly fell two years later when he took off one weekend to host a wild
party in San Francisco.
A minor starlet named Virginia Rappé became seriously
ill at the party and died four days later, and prosecutors became convinced
that Arbuckle had raped her and caused her death. He was put through three
trials and the newspaper coverage — particularly the Hearst press (Keaton, who
regarded Arbuckle not only as a friend but as a filmmaking mentor, said Hearst
once told him the Arbuckle case had sold more papers than any story since the
sinking of the Lusitania) — was
predictably scandalous. Paramount head Adolph Zukor dropped Arbuckle, no other
studio would touch him, and while he was acquitted on his third trial (most
modern writers who’ve studied the case believe that Rappé had had a botched
abortion and her death was a delayed reaction from that) his career was ruined.
In 1927 William Randolph Hearst, perhaps as a sort of atonement for having done
so much to ruin Arbuckle, offered him a comeback opportunity to direct Marion
Davies in the film The Red Mill — though Arbuckle had to use a pseudonym, “Will B. Goodrich” (some
people have suggested this was a deliberate joke from a master comedian and the
name was actually supposed to mean “will be good … and rich”), and he didn’t
get to act again on screen until 1935, when Jack Warner signed him for a series
of six two-reelers with the promise of a feature if the two-reelers did well.
They did, but before Arbuckle could make his feature-film comeback he died
suddenly. Despite the scandal that foreshortened his career, Arbuckle made more
money for himself and his producers than any other silent comedian except
Charlie Chaplin — who got his start at Keystone while Arbuckle was the star of
the lot — more than Keaton, more than Harold Lloyd (who, unlike his
contemporaries, married just once, led a quiet private life, kept his money and
invested it in land — which meant he made more money from the Southern
California real-estate boom in the late 1940’s than he had during his film
career), more than Harry Langdon.
These seven films — Fatty Joins the Force (1913), A Flirt’s Mistake (1914), The Knockout (1914), Leading Lizzie Astray (1914), Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego
Exposition (1915), Fatty and
Mabel’s Simple Life (1915), and Fatty’s
Chance Acquaintance (1915) — are pretty
typical Keystone fare, though they show that, contrary to the stereotype people
have today of the Keystone comedies as exclusively slapstick, they have
elements of what would now be called situation comedy as well. (Interestingly,
they were advertised in their original credits as “farce comedy” even though
one comic genre they did not encompass was what we would think of today as
farce.) Quite a few of them feature Mack Sennett’s jaundiced (to say the
least!) view of police officers — not only do the Keystone Kops appear in some
but Fatty Joins the Force is about Arbuckle rescuing a girl from drowning and, because she’s the
police commissioner’s daughter, is rewarded with a job on the police force.
Only he loses it again when he goes for a swim in the same lake where he rescued
the girl — and some pranksters steal his clothes and cut his fancy police pants
to ribbons. Arbuckle dresses in his foreshortened uniform and is arrested as a
vagrant. A Flirt’s Mistake entangles Arbuckle as a married man with a fiercely jealous potentate,
referred to as a “Rajah” in the titles but actually looking more Middle Eastern
than (East) Indian, who from the long robe he wears and the frilly parasol he
carries looks like a woman until he turns around and you see his long beard.
(Though it wasn’t made until two years later, he actually looks like one of the
actors playing Babylonians in Intolerance got lost and ended up on the wrong location.) He already attracts the
attentions of a masher, and swears death on all subsequent flirts … Leading
Lizzie Astray is the usual story of the
innocent young country girl (Minta Durfee again — she also played Arbuckle’s
girlfriend in Fatty Joins the Force and his wife in A Flirt’s Mistake) lured to The City — the
very words take on a sinister meaning in the titles — by a moustachioed
seducer, with Arbuckle obliged to save her from the Fate Worse Than Death.
Fatty
and Mabel’s Simple Life shows
them as boyfriend and girlfriend working on her father’s farm — until the
villainous squire who holds the mortgage on dad’s land says he’ll tear it up if
Mabel will marry his son (who’s actually a tall, handsome, slender young man
who quite frankly looks like a much more appealing match for her than Arbuckle,
especially since he’s not shown having a girlfriend on the side or some sinister design on Our
Heroine), and of course Arbuckle is not pleased by this at all — especially
when dad locks Mabel in her room until she says yes to the mortgage holder’s
son and she and Arbuckle have to plot their escape (and keep quiet so they won’t
be caught — in all seven of these films this is the only gag that would have
been considerably funnier with sound). The Knockout is the most interesting of these seven films;
directed by Arbuckle, it’s an all-star Keystone production in which he plays a
young man who, to impress his girlfriend (Mabel Normand this time — and she was
a much better actress and more
appealing screen personality than Minta Durfee, even though one could readily
imagine Durfee thinking of Normand the way Joan Crawford later thought of Norma
Shearer: “How can I compete with her? She sleeps with the boss!”) agrees to
appear in a boxing match with a thug who’s impersonating the champion Cyclone
Flynn — although, in a typical film-plot complication, he ends up in the ring
with the real Cyclone Flynn. After quite
a lot of surprisingly dull exposition (though the sight of Arbuckle in his
thrown-together boxing outfit is a hoot!), once the fight starts we’re treated
to Charlie Chaplin, better dressed than he was as the “Tramp” but with the
familiar tousled hair and toothbrush moustache, playing the referee. Once
Chaplin appears the film takes off and flies; he easily upstages both Arbuckle
and the actor playing Flynn with three minutes’ worth of relentless business,
getting between the fighters, ducking under them as they’re in a clinch, playing up the whole
homoeroticism of boxing as a sport and, quite frankly, throwing in our faces
the difference between talent and genius. (There’s another nice bit of
gender-bending as Mabel disguises herself as a man to get to see the fight; at
the time women weren’t allowed to attend boxing matches.)
Arbuckle was a
genuinely funny performer — as Frank Capra recalled, he was ambidextrous and
was a favorite in pie-fight scenes because he could throw two pies
simultaneously, one in each arm, and land them both on their intended targets —
and, like Oliver Hardy, he was formidably athletic despite his jumbo size. What
he didn’t do was create a comic
character as memorable as Chaplin’s, Keaton’s, Langdon’s or Lloyd’s; in some
sequences in these films Keystone’s writers (there were a number of them and
they sat at a long table and bounced ideas off each other — in addition to his
other innovations, Mack Sennett basically invented the “writers’ room”) make Arbuckle
a milquetoast, in other scenes they make him super-strong. They basically had
Arbuckle do whatever they thought would get audiences to laugh, character
consistency be damned, and the roughhouse nature of the Keystone comedy didn’t
help either. In his autobiography Chaplin recalled that his first clash with
Sennett came when Sennett explained to him that all Keystone films ended in a
chase. “Personally, I hated a chase,” Chaplin said. “It dissipates one’s
personality; little as I knew about movies, I knew that nothing transcended
personality.” A surprising number of Keystone comedies, including three or four
in this sampling, ended not only with a chase, but with one of the characters
pulling out two pistols and firing them at random at a crowd — never actually
hitting anybody but scaring them senseless and forcing them to flee in ways
that could be staged for laughs. (Remember that these films were made only a
quarter-century after Frederick Jackson Turner announced “the closing of the
West” in 1890, and it was likely the original audiences for them just accepted
that people went about carrying guns wherever they went — a current fever dream
of the NRA.) The next time Arbuckle and Chaplin appeared together, it was in The
Rounders, a film written and directed
by Chaplin based on a skit Chaplin had done with the Fred Karno troupe on stage
in the British music halls — and together they created a comedy masterpiece
that essentially set the template for Laurel and Hardy’s entire career and was
considerably funnier than any of the seven films in this package.
