Oh Doctor! (1917)

Before we get down to business, slight retraction from last week’s Buster Monday.  I’d said that Fatty assumes Buster’s winking is a signal to serve some on-the-sly Prohibition-era liquor, but Prohibition didn’t start until 1920.  So, it seems the secrecy is just down to alcohol not being on the traditional soda-fountain menu.  I guess I’m so used to the Prohibition nods in Buster’s movies that it didn’t occur to me that some silent comedies take place before that was a thing.

Anyway, on to Oh Doctor!  At the horse track with his wife and young son (played by Buster, just ‘cause,) Fatty, a doctor, meets and falls for a beautiful woman (Alice Mann.)  Unfortunately, the new object of his secret affection is involved with a bad sort – namely, her criminal boyfriend played by Al St. John.  After Alice enters his sphere, Fatty gets mixed up in gambling and general sneaking-around, and there’s thievery and police chases aplenty.

I’d call this middling for a Fatty Arbuckle short.  The plot is a bit all-over-the-place, but I like that the slapstick is a little heavier on chases and tumbles than on knock-down drag-outs.  In particular, Buster has some really nice tumbling from Fatty pushing him around.  There are also some fun gags, including Fatty “anchoring” his car by tying it to a small rock, an amusing pantomime sequence wherein Fatty tries to flirt with Alice without his wife overhearing, and a good bit involving Fatty disguised as a police officer.

No lie:  the idea of Buster playing a bona fide child is ridiculous, but he commits to it 100%.  His kid mannerisms, like the way he tugs on Fatty’s jacket or rocks on his heels, remind me a little of when he stands in for the monkey in The Playhouse.  Even though it’s blindingly obvious that he’s not really a kid/monkey, he mimics their actions so well that you could nearly fool yourself into believing otherwise.

Because he’s not exactly a cherub, Buster gets plenty of tough-love manhandling from Fatty, strong on “tough” and light on “love.”  I’ve said before that I especially love the scene where Fatty pushes Buster into a table and he somersaults backwards across it before landing neatly in a chair on the opposite side.  In the time it takes Fatty to cross the room, Buster has propped his feet up on the table and settled in with a book, as nonchalantly as if he meant to do it all along.  Very funny, and the standout moment of the short for me.

However, Buster-as-a-kid doesn’t take being shoved around as stoically as regular Buster.  He has a lot of exaggerated fake-crying reactions (not in the table scene, luckily,) and as Buster learned as an actual kid in vaudeville, he’s always funnier when he reacts less.  As such, even though the tumbling is impressive as usual, it’s not nearly as funny as it is with the stone face.  It feels hokier, more self-consciously “silent movie acting,” and that’s not really what Buster’s about.  Fortunately, while Buster experiments with his demeanor throughout the early Fatty Arbuckle shorts (The Rough House and His Wedding Night both have a few pulled faces,) I think next week’s Coney Island is the last before he settles more permanently into his classic deadpan.

Warnings

Slapstick violence, gambling, and some fairly tame adultery.