the silent film thread

Rediscovering Roscoe: The Careers of "Fatty" Arbuckle

http://moma.org/exhibitions/film_media/2006/Fatty_Arbuckle.html

(A friend co-curated this, so consider it slapstick spam.)

http://www.sfgate.com/traveler/postcards/arbuckle.jpg

When Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle checked into the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco for a Labor Day weekend of rest and recreation in September 1921, he was one of the most celebrated and beloved comedians in America. One week later, he was a pariah. On Sept. 11, Arbuckle was arrested for the rape and murder of Virginia Rappé, a 28-year-old actress who passed out during a party in Arbuckle's suite and died a few days later of peritonitis.

It mattered little that Arbuckle was subsequently cleared of all charges. That did not stop Will Hays, the first president of the organization that later became the Motion Picture Association of America, from issuing a ban on Arbuckle's films.

Although the ban was eventually lifted, the black mark against Arbuckle's name remained. Unable to work under his own name, he spent the balance of the 1920's directing shorts (and a pair of important features) for other comedians. Not until the early 30's did he appear on screen again, in a series of short films for Warner Brothers. The shorts were successful, and Arbuckle was celebrating the signing of a new contract when he died of heart failure in New York City on June 29, 1933. He was 46 years old.

Someday it may be possible to write an article about Roscoe Arbuckle without mentioning the scandal that destroyed his career. If that day comes, it will be because of the work of Arbuckle buffs like William Hunt and Paul E. Gierucki, who put together the indispensable four-DVD collection "The Forgotten Films of Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle" (www.mackinacmedia.com), and to Ron Magliozzi, Steve Massa and Ben Model, who programmed the monthlong series "Rediscovering Roscoe: The Careers of (Fatty) Arbuckle," which begins Thursday at the Museum of Modern Art.

Before sound, when movie actors had to state their personalities through a unique physical presence, Arbuckle looked like a sketch out of the Sunday funnies: the large, almost perfectly round head, bisected by a wide mouth that could leer or grin or lustily devour, perched atop an almost equally round body, the spherical qualities of the ensemble accentuated by a bowler hat. He was a large man, but not markedly obese. For all his bulk he was fast and graceful of movement, and many of the jokes in the early Keystone films — he started at Mack Sennett's pioneering comedy studio in 1913, after a career in vaudeville — depend on Arbuckle's surprising agility, as he ducks and dives and dashes to avoid the grasp of a pursuing policeman or the wrath of a jealous wife.

As seen on film, Arbuckle's build is that of both an overgrown infant and an adult sensualist, and he often shifts between the two connotations of his appearance for rich comic effect. He may approach a woman as an awkward, ungainly child, only to shoot a sudden look at the audience that bespeaks a happy, uninhibited lechery — an ambiguity that probably contributed to his image problems when his trial came up. He is also, like Chaplin and several other comedians of his age, an enthusiastic cross-dresser; with his corpulence poured into one of the tentlike bathing suits of the period, he could pass for a curvaceous Victorian woman of the sort only then going out of style. So convincing was Arbuckle as a woman that he made several shorts — "Miss Fatty's Seaside Lovers" is one, playing on Friday's program — in which he plays a female character, with no drag alibi involved.

A leering country bumpkin with barnyard manners and a libido to match in the early films, Arbuckle's character grew in complexity once he escaped the direct influence of Sennett, moving his unit in 1915 from California to Fort Lee, N.J., where he could make his own films with little interference. Films like "That Little Band of Gold" (1915) and "He Did and He Didn't" (1916) find Arbuckle moving away from Sennett's frenetic slapstick into a sophisticated comedy of sexual temptation and spousal envy. In the remarkable "He Did and He Didn't" (also playing on Friday), Arbuckle is a respected professional, a doctor who looks quite handsome in his tuxedo as he tries to cope with a flirtation between his wife (Mabel Normand, his frequent screen partner) and one of her old flames. The surreal climax, worthy of Philip K. Dick, reveals that the two rivals turn out to be sharing the same dream.

Arbuckle's richest period came after he left Sennett for the producer Joseph Schenck, who set him up with his own company, Comique. "The Butcher Boy," the first film under the new contract, introduced a new supporting player, Buster Keaton — an old acquaintance of Arbuckle's from the vaudeville circuit. The Keaton of the Comique shorts (there are two full programs of them at MoMA, on Saturday at 6 and 8 p.m.) is not the Great Stone Face of his later work, but a little demon of destruction who sets elaborate traps for Arbuckle and roars with laughter when he falls into them.

As brilliantly kinetic as the Comique shorts are, Arbuckle's character is essentially one-dimensional: the mischief maker who undermines everyone and everything, winking at the audience as he mounts ever greater outrages to human dignity. But when Paramount, the distributor of the Comique shorts, decided to move him into features, Arbuckle needed to add some depth to his screen character. He did so by looking to his old friend Chaplin and drawing pathos into his work.

In "The Round-Up", his first feature (next Sunday at 2 p.m.), Arbuckle is a sheriff in a small Western town whose magical fast draw goes unappreciated by the pretty young woman he has a crush on. "Nobody loves a fat man," reads the film's final intertitle, as Arbuckle lays his head down on a fence post, the picture of neglect and despair.

After the scandal, Arbuckle adopted his father's name, William Goodrich, as his pseudonym for a series of short films for which he served as director and gag man. Working with comics like Al St. John (Arbuckle's nephew, and a colleague since the Keystone days), Lloyd Hamilton and Lupino Lane, he created some highly enjoyable work in the middle to late 20's, all the more impressive for what he must have been going through emotionally at the time. His loyal friend Keaton hired him to direct "Sherlock, Jr." (1925), though apparently the strain of feature work was too much for him and he dropped out of the project. But he ended the 20's with two features: "The Red Mill" (1927), an adaptation of the Victor Herbert operetta starring Marion Davies, and "Special Delivery" (also 1927), a lively vehicle for a young Eddie Cantor, which will receive a rare screening on April 27.

One of the best of the late Warner Brothers shorts, "Buzzin' Around" (1933), which will be shown in the introductory program on Thursday at 6 p.m., reveals an Arbuckle who seems almost his old self, with a soft but sympathetic speaking voice that suggested he would have little trouble making the transition to sound. Arbuckle's fans have taken solace in the fact that he died the night his Warner contract was renewed. However he had spent the last 12 years of his life, he had finally regained the respect of the industry that had expelled him, and the affection of the audience that had turned on him so violently. In the end, some people did love that fat man; after the MoMA series, a few more may love him as well.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

goddamnit, i paid money to see 'a cottage on dartmoor' just a couple months ago.

and there were little old ladies with flowers waiting for her at the stage door.

http://www.mfah.org/main.asp?target=films&par1=1&par2=1&par3=685