The Cook (1918)

The Cook isn’t in The Best Arbuckle-Keaton Collection because, when that DVD came out in 2001, the short was still believed to be lost.  Fortunately, the majority of the film has since been rediscovered and released on the DVD The Cook and Other Treasures (the missing final scene is described in the intertitles.)  This one is just so much fun.

Almost entirely plotless.  Fatty works as the cook at the Bull Pup Café, where Buster is the waiter, Alice Lake is the cashier, and Fatty’s dog Luke is the bouncer.  The assorted restaurant gags are broken up on occasion by Al St. John, playing a literal tough customer who’s taken an unsavory shine to Alice.

I don’t care that the storyline is basically “Storyline – what’s that?”  This short is delightful, up to its ears in fabulous gags and fantastic comic sequences.  I love the juggling sensibilities Fatty brings to cooking (flipping pancakes between two different pans and off his shoe is especially fun,) as well as his fancy knifework.  I love that he has one enormous vat from which he gets everything from sliced ham to ice cream to coffee.  I love absolutely everything about the spaghetti scene, which is a comic master class in dreaming up numerous gags from a single prop.  Fatty wrapping individual strands of spaghetti around his finger before eating them is fun, as is the sight gag of him trying to knit his spaghetti.

Buster is no slouch in that scene, either.  Completely flummoxed by his spaghetti, he variously uses a straight edge razor, a teacup, and a pair of scissors to try to eat it.  Really, Buster is great throughout the short.  The running gag of him catching every dish Fatty tosses through the air to him – including, among other things, a bowl of soup and a glass of milk – is terrific.  He helps kick off this amazing dance sequence that comes out of nowhere and has nothing to do with anything, but it’s just wonderful.  I don’t even know where some of his dance moves come from; they do not look like 1918, I know that much.  The man was a class unto himself.

He feels really Busterish here, closer to his persona in his own films.  Something about the combination between supremely athletic/suave and hopeless clumsy.  He has all sorts of funny little bits of business, and he also takes his patented Buster Keaton Soulful Eyes out for a test drive with Alice Lake and another woman in the short.

The stuff with Al St. John isn’t as good, except when he’s being chased by Luke.  Watching that dog climb ladders never gets old for me, and I get a kick out the scene where Al is spinning around in circles with Luke’s teeth clamped on the seat of his pants.

And in the “there’s cartoon gags, and then there’s just crazy” category, we have Fatty accidentally bringing a meat cleaver down on Buster’s neck.  Yes, there’s the amusing bit afterwards in which he verifies that Buster’s head is still attached, but that is absolutely ridiculous.

Warnings

Slapstick violence, drinking, and an attempted abduction.