September
15, 1918 – the day The Cook was
released. This one’s a classic. While decidedly rougher than some of my
favorite Arbuckle-Keaton shorts, like The
Bell Boy or Back Stage, there’s
something really fun about the randomness of it. It’s just sort of this collection of running
gags and off-the-wall tangents, and it’s a delight (spoilers.)
The All-Purpose Vat
Back in
the kitchen, Fatty has a giant vat out of which he pulls everything from steak
to ham to scoops of ice cream, and it has a spigot at the bottom that variously
dispenses coffee, soup, and milk. It’s a
fun ongoing gag in the short, waiting to see what’s going to come out of it
next.
Kitchen Toss
Another
ongoing bit. Fatty gets all kinds of
Harlem Globetrotters with his cooking, flipping pancakes between his legs,
bouncing eggs off the floor, and so on.
And every single dish gets hurled over this tabletop shelf in the middle of
the kitchen, with Buster neatly catching each without spilling a drop. Mostly, these bits are of the “Fatty tosses
in one shot, Buster catches in the next” variety, but there’s one classic shot
in which Buster steps through the swinging doors into the kitchen and catches
an empty plate tossed to him from a dishwasher off to the side, while Fatty
simultaneously flips a pancake over his shoulder, which soars through the air
and lands on Buster’s plate as he’s fluidly swiveling around to head back out
the door! At a Buster Keaton convention
(one of the most wonderfully-nerdy events I’ve ever been to,) I once heard a
fantastic lecture speculating as to just how our intrepid filmmakers managed to
execute this three-second gag.
Ice Cream Mess
Buster
heads out of the kitchen with two dishes of ice cream, promptly walking into
someone and smushing one of them in the guy’s face. But the real
fun starts when, in his anxiousness to help clean it up, Buster drops the other
scoop down the back of a woman’s dress.
Between Buster “going in” himself to try and retrieve it and a chain of
mishaps that leads to someone catapulting through the swinging doors into the
kitchen, it’s a classic escalating-disaster scenario.
Luke to the Rescue
That dog
is a marvel. While he later shows off
his trick of climbing ladders and helps Fatty maneuver the world’s longest
fishing pole, this scene features him working to oust an unruly Al St. John,
clinging by his teeth to the seat of Al’s pants, flying off the ground as Al spins in a circle.
Spaghetti
An
extended break that’s purely an exercise in seeing how many spaghetti gags can
be stuffed into a single scene. There’s
Fatty wrapping individual noodles around his finger then popping them into his
mouth, a “two people eating opposite ends of the same long noodle” bit way
before Lady and the Tramp did it, and
Fatty “knitting” his spaghetti among other things. No surprise, though, Buster has my favorite
gags. After a number of false starts, he
plops a mess of noodles into a coffee cup and “shaves” off the excess hanging
over the rim, and he later takes a scissors to both his own noodles and other
people’s. Love it!
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