Leap Year (Joseph M. Schenck Productions, Paramount, 1921)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night there were a number of items I’d have wanted to watch on TV, including part one of a two-part minoseries on the African-American church (I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it before but I did a search on moviemagg for “The Black Church” and didn’t find one; however, just “Black Church” turned up https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/06/by-mark-gabrish-conlan-copyright-2021.html). But I ended up watching an intriguing “Silent Sunday Showcase” presentation on Turner Classic Movies: Leap Year, a feature-length comedy made by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle in 1921. This hour-long film was Arbuckle’s 10th feature-length movie and ultimately his last as star, writer and co-director (James Cruze got credit for the direction but Arbuckle almost certainly had a lot to do with it). The reason was the sensational scandal that broke after Arbuckle took some of his cast and crew members to San Francisco for a party on the Labor Day weekend in 1921. A young actress named Virginia Rappé died during the festivities, and since Arbuckle had been seen going into her room shortly before her body was discovered, he was accused of murdering her in the process of raping her. Arbuckle endured three trials on these charges; his first two ended in hung juries (the first jury broke for acquittal and the second for conviction) and the foreman of the third jury in the case was so appalled by the lack of any real evidence against him that he sent a note to the jud reading, “Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle.” (Most modern scholarson the case beliee Rappé died from peritonitis or another infecdtion she got from a botched illegal abortion.)

But the scandal totally wrecked his career; Paramount scrapped the three unreleased features he had made for their release (including this one) and no other studio would touch him even after his ultimate exoneratioin. In 1927 William Randolph Hearst, who told his friends that Arbuckle’s trials had sold more newspapers than any other story he’d printed, hired Arbuckle to direct a film called The Red Mill, an adaptation of an old operetta starring Hearst’s girlfriend, Marion Davies. Alas, even though Arbuckle used a pseudonym, “Will B. Goodrich” (which Hollywood wags interpreted as a coded promise from Arbuckle, “Will be good – and rich”). the film flopped. (I’ve seen it on a previous TCM “Silent Sunday Showcase” and it isn’t very good.) Ironically, until the spectacular crash and burn of his career, Arbuckle had made more money for the studios and himself than any other silent comedian except Charlie Chaplin – more than Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd or Harry Langdon. Arbuckle had also mentored both Chaplin and Keaton – Chaplin when they both worked for Macn Sennett’s Keystone Studos in 1914 and Keaton after Arbuckle left Keystone and started his own studio, Comicque Film Corporation, in partnership with producer Joseph M. Schenck in 1917. Keaton had visited the set of Arbuckle’s first Comicque film, The Butcher Boy (1917), just to see what this motion picture business was about, and he ended up playing a part in the movie and working for Arbuckle for the next two years (with a break because he was drafted into World War I, though luckily for him the war was over before he arrived in France and he spent most of his time in the Army doing camp shows; Keaton’s 1930 film Doughboys, by far the best of his early talkies, offers a good glimpse of what he actually did) until 1920, when Schenck decided it was time for Arbuckle to start making features and he had Keaton take over as the star of his shorts.

Arbuckle’s first feature was The Round-Up (1920), and for the next two years he made 10 features in all until the scandal that foreshortened his career. I’ve long been curious as to whether Arbuckle could have sustained a feature-length film because all too many of his shorts are disjointed. Unlike Chaplin and Keaton, Arbuckle seems to have been willing to do anything as long as he thought it would make an audience laugh, character consistency be damned. I’ve also noted in prior comments on the great silent comedians that each of them seemed to occupy a defined class niche – Chaplin the lower-class “Tramp,” Arbuckle the working-class everyman, Lloyd the middle-class striver and Keaton the upper-class twit. Yet in Leap Year Arbuckle cast himself as an upper-class twit: to wit, Stanley Piper, who’s been raised by his bitter, gouty, dyspeptic and woman-hating uncle Jeremiah (Luien Littlefield). Jeremiah has a visiting nurse, Phyllis Brown (Mary Thurman), only in the opening scene he fires her because he can’t stand her helmet-like bobbed hair or her overall femaleness. He demands a man to replace her, but she hangs around because she’s got a crush on Stanley. Unfortunately, so do a lot of other women in the movie, including Loris Keene (Harriet Hammond), mistress of married man Scott Travis (Clarence Geldert). Scott asks Stanley to be his “beard” and escort Loris while his wife (Winifred Greenwood) visits Catalina Island, where he’s staying for a vacation with Loris. Loris forms a huge crush on Stanley, and so does Irene Rutherford (Maude Wayne), who fishes him out of the sea and brings him aboard her yacht. Another woman named Molly Morris (Gertrude Short) also falls for Stanley, and when he tries to scare all these unwanted womenfolk away by feigning uncontrollable mental fits, Phyllos and Molly compete for the privilege of nursing him.

Leap Year is pretty much a one-joke movie, and the one joke – Stanley’s alleged irresistibility to women – gets awfully tiresome after a while. The plot ends rather abruptly – I think Stanley and Phyllis end up together, but I’m not sure – and if there’s any indication from the script by Sarah Y. Mason (who co-wrote the script for the 1933 Little Women with her husband, Victor Heerman, who also intersected the careers of comedy legends when he directed the second Marx Brothers film, Animal Crackers) and Walter Woods as to why the film is called Leap Year, I missed it. If Arbuckle could have sustained a feature-length movie as star and auteur, he certainly didn’t prove it here.