The Cook (Comicque Film Corporation, Paramount, 1918)

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

When my husband Charles came home, we ended up watching a short documentary on the career of largely forgotten silent film comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, who made more money than any silent comedy star except Charlie Chaplin and, like Chaplin, won the right to write and direct his own films. Arbuckle’s career came to a crashing end on Labor Day weekend in 1921, when he took a vacation to San Francisco, rented a suite at the St. Francis Hotel and hosted a party. The party ended with the death of an otherwise forgettable starlet named Virginia Rappé, who took sick at the party and was rushed to a local hospital, where she croaked without ever regaining consciousness. Arbuckle was accused of having raped and killed her – one story was that he had fatally injured her by penetrating her with a Coke bottle (a tale that might have had its roots in the account of Arbuckle’s first wife, Minta Durfee, who said he couldn’t maintain an erection to have sex normally) – and he went through three trials. The jury at the first trial deadlocked 10 to 2 for acquittal; at the second trial they deadlocked again, but in favor of conviction. After the third trial Arbuckle was not only acquitted, the foreperson sent a note to the effect that “Acquittal is not good enough for Roscoe Arbuckle.” But even before there was a jury verdict in either direction, Paramount, which had Arbuckle under contract via his independent company, had dropped him and physically destroyed his unreleased features. No other studio would hire him, and at a time when women’s organizations and the Roman Catholic Church already had it in for the film industry, Arbuckle became one of the poster children (along with his former Keystone Studios co-star Mabel Normand and the mysterious British-born director William Desmond Taylor) for Hollywood’s alleged immorality. Fearful of government censorship of movies – the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in 1912 that movies were strictly “a business” and therefore weren’t protected by the First Amendment, an opinion that stood until 1953 – the major studios got together and hired former Postmaster General Will Hays to head an office that would ensure that both the movies and the people who made them would stay “clean.”

In a way Arbuckle, like Bill Cosby, set himself up; just a few months before that wild weekend in San Francisco he had given an interview proclaiming his determination never to make any movie that wouldn’t be wholesome entertainment for the entire family, including children. Later stars with more raffish screen images, like Marlene Dietrich and Errol Flynn, were able to survive public scandals with their careers relatively unscathed. Arbuckle continued to work as a live performer in nightclubs and the rapidly shrinking number of vaudeville theatres, and he occasionally was allowed to direct films under the pseudonym “William B. Goodrich” (i.e., “Will be good and rich”). His most famous directorial credit as “Goodrich” was a 1927 silent called The Red Mill, starring Marion Davies and produced by her sugar-daddy William Randolph Hearst, who seems to have given Arbuckle the assignment largely to atone for how much money he and his papers had made off their wildly sensational coverage of Arbuckle’s trials and scandal. Among other points the YouTube mini-documentary made about Arbuckle was that he mentored both Charlie Chaplin (at Mack Sennett’s Keystone studio) and Buster Keaton (at Arbuckle’s own Comicque Film Corporation, which he and producer Joseph Schenck set up after Arbuckle left Keystone in 1917). A number of gags identified today with both Chaplin (the dance with the bread-rolls in The Gold Rush) and Keaton (the one in which a false front collapses on top of him and he’s saved only because he happens to fall through an open window) were actually originated in Arbuckle’s films. Arbuckle was also the first film personality to sign a $1 million contract, and he anticipated both Chaplin and Keaton in winning the right to write and direct his own films, Keaton in particular never forgot his debt to Arbuckle; in the late interviews he gave as a sort of grand old man of comedy Keaton said, “Everything I knew about directing I’d learned from watching Arbuckle do it.” Arbuckle’s career ended tragically when he died suddenly of a heart attack in his sleep while on the brink of a major comeback. In 1933 Jack Warner signed him to do six two-reel comedies with the promise of a feature deal if they were successful. They were, but just before Arbuckle was about to sign to make his first feature, he died.

After we watched the mini-documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsrIlnZwzHw) – which was titled My Name Is Roscoe, after Arbuckle’s own frequent criticism of people who addressed him as “Fatty” – we went to another YouTube post and saw The Cook (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSTq10qm9cE), a 1918 two-reeler from Comicque and Paramount which featured Arbuckle as a cook in a fancy restaurant and Keaton as his waiter. Earlier I’d posted moviemagg reviews of two collections of Arbuckle’s comedies from his Keystone days and I’d said that one reason I don’t think he’s as well-remembered as Chaplin or Keaton was lack of character consistency. Arbuckle would literally do anything for a laugh, whether it made sense for the character he was supposed to be playing or not. Admittedly I’ve never seen any of Arbuckle’s surviving features and I’m basing that only on his one- and two-reelers – they lasted between 10 and 25 minutes and comedy shorts didn’t demand the kind of careful characterizations as did features (something both Chaplin and Keaton learned when they started making features and realized there were some gags they could get away with in two-reelers that they couldn’t in longer movies). (Actually I had seen an Arbuckle feature before, Leap Year, and written about it on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/11/leap-year-joseph-am-schenck-productions.html. I just hadn’t remenbered it!) The first reel of The Cook shows Arbuckle and Keaton incredibly agile – Arbuckle is able to make elaborate dishes and throw them across the restaurant floor, and Keaton equally able to catch them, without spilling any food. They also do a bizarre spoof of spaghetti (which is referred to in an intertitle as “tapeworm a la carte”) in which Arbuckle, Keaton and two companions adopt elaborate and highly bizarre ways of eating it, including putting it in a funnel and trying to extract its contents. The gag reaches its payoff when the two other men at the table string a length of spaghetti between their mouths – and Arbuckle and Keaton hang napkins out to dry along it, then snip it with scissors.

In reel two Arbuckle, Keaton and their comic-villain nemesis, Al St. John, end up at an amusement park called “Goatland.” At first I wondered why it was called that, but then I saw the people there were riding around in rental carts pulled by goats. There are some terrific scenes of Arbuckle, Keaton, St. John and the woman they’re all more or less interested in (Alice Lake) chasing each other around a roller-coaster (though fortunately for them it’s not in operation through most of the film) and some scenes in which Arbuckle has to contend with Luke, his own dog who made appearances in many of his films. Also there’s a spectacular dive off a high platform that’s supposedly the Alice Lake character but whom I suspect was really Buster Keaton in drag; in his later star years, Keaton was famous not only for doing his own stunts but frequently risking on the sets of other movies and stunt-doubling for other actors (of both genders) as well. I wouldn’t call Roscoe Arbuckle a comic genius at Chaplin’s or Keaton’s level – I remember one of Arbuckle’s Keystone films, The Knockout, which cast him as a prizefighter and Chaplin as the referee, and watching them together you could see the difference between talent and genius (though they were much better matched in another Keystone movie, The Rounders, based on a sketch Chaplin had done in the London music halls that could be described as the movie Laurel and Hardy spent their whole careers ripping off) – but it does seem horrendously unfair that he’s been written out of the histories of classic Hollywood over a scandal that (unlike the one that brought down Bill Cosby) wasn’t even his fault; the modern consensus about Virginia Rappé’s death was she died from peritonitis caused by a botched illegal abortion (the sort of thing modern-day Republicans want to return us to as their way of “making America great again”).