"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Monday, November 3, 2014

Silent Style: Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton


Other than Buster Keaton, Fatty Arbuckle is the only silent clown whose work I’ve seen a modest sample of, and even then, I’ve mostly just seen his collaborations with Buster.  Still, it’s interesting to look at the differences between Buster’s work and the shorts he made with Fatty.
 
We begin with the strangest feature of Fatty’s shorts:  Buster’s smile!  Though he began using the stone face during his childhood vaudeville days, he evidently wasn’t sure about doing the same in movies.  He still tends to default to stone face, but there are many shorts in which he smiles, laughs, cries, or otherwise mugs.  Besides being bizarre to see (it feels wrong to see his teeth so well,) it truly isn’t as funny, and I don’t know what it is.  Maybe it’s because the faces he pulls are too big and don’t feel genuine?  Either way, he really is funnier when he doesn’t smile.
 
Each man has a different go-to comic set-piece.  For Buster, it’s clearly “chase scene.”  In films like Cops and Seven Chances, the story exists mainly to justify the epic chases at the end, and The General is essentially a series of chases topped with a bridge collapse.  When in doubt, give him someone to run from.  Fatty’s main mode of action, based on the shorts I’ve seen, seems to be “brawl.”  Many of his movies involve long, often messy fights.  Kicks, punches, and all sorts of thrown objects crop up in various knockdown-drag-outs.  Buster’s first onscreen stunt was taking a sack of flour to the face in The Butcher Boy, a film that also features the only pies thrown in his silent career (Fatty’s sets must’ve been covered with ants – so much food-throwing.)  Not that Buster’s movies don’t have a fair share of slapstick violence, but he’s much more rough-and-tumble in Fatty’s shorts.  He’s a regular scrapper, and an impressive one; in His Wedding Night, his scissor-kicks a guy in the face apropos of basically nothing.
 
Drag is a big feature of Fatty’s movies.  Nearly half of the thirteen Fatty-Buster shorts have extended drag sequences, including disguises, mistaken identities, and instances of one man unknowingly flirting with another.  Buster himself gets dolled up for the play in Back Stage, delivers and models wedding dresses in His Wedding Night, and plays an actual woman briefly in Good Night, Nurse (the latter’s not exactly drag – just easier to throw a skirt on Buster and cover his face than to find an actress who can do the stunts.)  Buster’s work includes a little drag:  he plays a few women in the dream sequence in The Playhouse, and he briefly dons dresses to make getaways in Our Hospitality and Sherlock Jr.  However, it’s not nearly as prominent.
 
Lastly, Buster’s films tend to feel more cohesive.  Though many of his shorts meander, they often form a chain of cause-and-effect.  Even shorts that are a series of vignettes around a specific set or theme, like The Boat, build and come to a head.  Fatty’s shorts feel more slapdash.  When I reviewed my top five shorts of his, I found they were hard to summarize beyond giving the setting, and there are more comedic tangents not tied back to the film as a whole.
 
I’m not getting down on Fatty; I really enjoy the films he and Buster made.  They’re tons of fun, there are some great gags, and Buster’s athleticism is insane.  Like Buster, Fatty knew how to use the camera to his advantage, and he had a fine imagination.  I’d like to see more of his work – the humor and style in the Fatty-Buster shorts becomes more Buster-ish over time, and I wonder what, if any, changes there are in Fatty’s films before/after working with Buster (plus those made while Buster was overseas in WWI.)  Not sure how much is extant, but I’m curious.

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