This is
one of my least favorite of the Fatty Arbuckle shorts. Yes, that’s partly because Buster doesn’t
have a whole lot to do, but it’s also because the story is paper-thin, the
violence veers too far out of bounds for slapstick, and it mostly feels like
stuff just happens. Overall, it pretty
aptly demonstrates Fatty’s philosophy that the average mind of the movie-going
audience is twelve years old.
Fatty
is a tenant at a boarding house. When a
big to-do breaks out between the cook (Al St. John) and the delivery boy
(Buster) with the maid (Josephine Stevens, who also played the girl in The Butcher Boy) caught in the middle,
there’s a major culling of the staff and Fatty winds up the new hired
help. Lots of havoc, running around, and
workplace no-nos.
Like I
said, there’s a lot happening here
but not much going on. It just kind of careens from one thing to the
next with no real thought as to why.
Also, the violence gets way over-the-top. I know that that’s what you sign up for with
slapstick, and Buster’s films show him getting into plenty of scrapes he has no
logical business surviving (although in his movies, it’s usually related to
outrageous falls rather than than fighting,) but here, it’s just too much. While I’m down with characters scrapping or
throwing food, Buster winds up chasing Al with a kitchen knife and throwing
it at him. That’s way beyond, “I’m gonna
get you!” or, “Why, I oughta…” That’s
just insane. Also, a later scene finds
Fatty randomly deputized by a cop who’s tailing a thief, and the cop naturally
gives Fatty a gun (you know, as cops do.)
As it happens, Fatty would have to shape up quite a bit before he could
work his way up to being no help at all; he hangs around the kitchen aimlessly
shooting the gun for kicks, all the while causing a panic as bullets fly in the
next room. What the what?!
But
there is some good stuff. When Fatty accidentally sets his bed on fire
with a cigarette, I love the calm, matter-of-fact way he tries to put it out
one teacupful of water at a time. Once
he becomes the new cook/butler, there are some neat gags – in one, camera
trickery allows him carry in a full service in a bundled-up tablecloth, the
table setting itself perfectly as he lays down the cloth, and in another (gross
but amusing) bit, he uses a sponge to serve (and unserve) soup. Also, I’m not sure if he invented the dancing bread rolls gag, but he certainly put it on camera
years before Chaplin did; The Rough House
predates The Gold Rush by about eight
years.
So
where’s Buster in all of this, you ask?
He’s used pretty sparingly, doing double duty in two smallish roles as
the gardener (his fake beard is ridiculous, but you can recognize that tumbling
anywhere) and the delivery boy who apparently tries to murder Al St. John with
a knife before both of them join the police force (the cops have incredibly lax
standards in this short.) It’s after he
becomes a cop that he has the most fun. I’ve raved before about the absolutely amazing throwaway scene in which, starting
from a dead stop, he scissorkicks a taller man in the face for basically no
provocation – it makes no sense but it’s so
impressive. There’s also a long
running-around sequence that involves tumbles, flips, and getting pretty
hilarious snagged on a fence.
Warnings
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