Mixed
feelings on this one. Compared to The Rough House, it’s quite a bit
funnier, the plot holds together better, and no one chases anyone with a knife,
but there’s also some pretty messed-up stuff going on. Buster, though, is a delight; this is the
first Fatty Arbuckle short where he definitely feels like a character rather
than a (firstrate) comic prop. A few
spoilers.
Fatty
is working at a soda fountain, showing off his mad ice-cream-serving skills and
making eyes at the boss’s daughter. The
two lovebirds get engaged, but spurned rival Al St. John has his own ideas to
thwart their happiness. Buster has a
small but significant role as a delivery boy.
Fatty
is fun here, as is frequent collaborator Alice Lake as his girl. It’s interesting the way relationships seem
to work in silent comedies. They tend to
go from zero to marriage in two minutes flat, and yet courtships often play out
in such a childlike manner (it tracks with the way a lot of silent comics
simply call their character “the boy” – Buster did this a lot in his shorts, as
did Harold Lloyd.) I like their coziness
together and Fatty’s recurring habit of “tasting” kisses from the girl in his
movies. As usual, there’s also “fun with
work” stuff, with Fatty showboating with the ice cream and later clowning
around as a shrewd gas pump attendant.
But
parts of this short are seriously messed-up.
Al’s plan to kidnap Alice and make her forcibly marry him instead of Fatty falls under the “obviously
sexist but kind of expected for a silent comedy” category – it sometimes feels
like about half of the woman’s job in a silent comedy is to get abducted by the
villain. However, there’s also this
really weird, really frakked-up subplot involving a lot of chloroforming, both
accidental and intentional, and it actually features Fatty kissing an
unconscious woman and then chloroforming her again as she comes to so he can keep kissing her. I mean… what?!? Needless to say, not a good moment for
American cinema.
And
then there’s Buster, Buster the wedding-dress delivery boy. He’s just a hoot here, and there’s a logical
throughline to his scenes that moves the story from point A to point B (I
wonder if he had a hand in writing this part of the film – I know he said he
was Fatty’s unofficial AD by the third film they were in together.) Making a crash landing with his bike outside
the store, Buster gets dust in his eye and can’t stop winking when he gets to
the counter. Fatty interprets the wink
as a sign to hook him up with a little Prohibition-era delight on the quiet,
and I’m assuming that it’s because Buster’s drunk that he models the wedding
dress for Alice instead of just delivering it to her (although she only seems
surprised that he starts undressing in front
of her, not the mere fact that he’s undressing, so maybe this is just part of
Buster’s standard delivery service?)
Anyway, this leads to the comic climax of Al accidentally kidnapping Buster, not Alice. See?
Crazy and silly, but logical from beat to beat. Also, because I’m lawfully bound to bring
this up every time I talk about His
Wedding Night, Buster momentarily loses track of the wedding dress and checks his pockets for it. Just a tiny throwaway moment, but so
fantastically hilarious. Who else did
stuff like that?
Warnings
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