That Old Feeling: Fatty and Buster

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The early cinema had few rules; actors and directors, especially in comedy, made them up as they went along. Like many of the grown-up kids in movies at the time, Arbuckle and Keaton played with the medium as if it were a fascinating toy, a comic prop, something to be played with and reshaped. The 1917 "Rough House" was full of movie tricks. Fatty gets whacked by a tureen, sees stars (animated special effects) and tries to count them. Reverse photography was a favorite gimmick: it allowed St. John to "catch" a thrown kitchen knife in his teeth, or Fatty to lay out a dinner setting from dishes he’d bunched inside a table cloth. These bits told the audience it’s only a game, folks. In later films Arbuckle would wink and nudge with even less abandon. "Moonshine" (1918) ran the scene of a cabin being blown up forward and backward; in case moviegoers missed the point, a title card told them: "Fatty deserves great acclaim for the scene where the cabin explodes and automatically reassembles itself."

"Moonshine" was loopy with such inside jokes. An open-sesame gag is explained by this titled card: "The pressure of the foot on the trick stone releases a device which was all the director’s idea." A supporting player executes a nice stunt, and Fatty says, "That was a beautiful fall. He sure earned his paycheck." Any infelicities in the plot are airily waved away. After Fatty improbably woos a rural gal, her father erupts at the improbability of it all. Fatty replies, "Look, this is only a two-reeler. We don’t have time to build up to love scenes." And the moonshiner says: "In that case, go ahead. It’s your movie." At the climax, Fatty wonders where all the extras went. "They took a lunch break," Buster says, and Fatty decides, "Never mind. We’ll do the explosion scene without them." This impudent self-consciousness was a descendent of the stage clown’s undercutting asides to the audience, and a primitive ancestor of the attitude Keaton would turn into comic art; one suspects he had a lot to do with it.

If a bit worked, it would be reworked, or simply repeated, in later films; the cinema was still too young to have a memory. A weird bit of courtship in the 1919 Keaton-Arbuckle "Back Stage" — when a girl kisses Fatty, he wipes his lips with his finger and then sucks it, as if to savor the flavor of romance — is the exact replay of a Fatty scene in the 1914 Keystone Kops short, "The Knockout." In "Coney Island," Arbuckle copies another gag from "The Knockout," when he starts to take off his pants, then "realizes" that he’s in a movie and signals to cameraman to tilt camera, so we don’t see him unpantsed. Sometimes Keaton and Arbuckle would reuse comic tropes from their own films. In "The Bell Boy," Keaton is seen inside a phone booth, cleaning a window, blowing on a tough spot; then he leans out through the "window" — the gag is that there is no glass — and cleans the same spot from the other side. Two years later, in "The Garage," Arbuckle does the same routine, with a bit less panache.

"Back Stage" includes a gag that Keaton would later develop into one of the most fraught and famous in movie comedy history. During their impromptu revue, Fatty is standing stage front, the façade of a two-story house behind him; the set falls forward and collapses over Fatty, but he is not hurt, because there’s an open window in the upper story and he happened to be standing in that hole. Keaton would reprise the stunt in his first solo short, "One Week," then elaborate on it in his last independent feature, the 1928 "Steamboat Bill Jr.", this time with a two-ton A-frame house. "We had a clearance of two inches on each shoulder, he told British film historian John Gillett, "and the top missed my head by two inches and the bottom my heels by two inches." It’s still an amazing moment — not least because of Keaton’s poised indifference to the near-catastrophe — that would remain an inspiration and a challenge to movie daredevils. Jackie Chan would replicate it in his 1987 "Project A Part 2."

The Arbuckle shorts were invaluable apprentice work for Keaton. Not as an actor — he hardly needed training in that from Arbuckle, since he was already the star’s superior in physical humor and screen presence — but as a budding director. "The first thing I did in the studio," Keaton recalled in 1964, "was to want to tear that camera to pieces. I had to know how that film got in the cutting room, what you did to it in there, and how you made things mesh and how you finally got the picture together." This intimate process (Keaton’s biographer, Rudi Blesh, called it "climbing inside" the camera) was the beginning of a marriage of man and machine that would last for a decade and sire many buoyant comedies.

Keaton was loyal to Arbuckle: returning in 1919 after war service with the 40th Infantry in France, he was offered $3000 a week to star for Warner Bros., but he stayed with FA for $750 a week. His affection for his boss was matched by his respect for Arbuckle’s competence as a director. "I just watched Arbuckle do it, and that’s all there was to it," he said in a clip from Brownlow’s superb documentary, "Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow." When Brownlow interviewed him for "The Parade’s Gone By," Keaton said: "I was only with him [Arbuckle] about three pictures when I became his assistant director... I mean when he was doing a scene and I wasn’t in it, I was alongside the camera to watch it. I directed when he was in the scene. So by the time I’d spent a year with him, it was no problem at all to direct when I set out on my own."

That came in 1920. Schenck decided Arbuckle was ready for features, and Keaton took over the Arbuckle lot. From "One Week," his first two-reeler, Keaton demonstrated his knowledge and control of the medium. He would soon be ranked in popularity and critical esteem with Chaplin and Harold Lloyd; today, many think he’s the finest, most modern, most cinematic of them all.

And as Buster’s star rose, Fatty’s crashed. On Labor Day 1921 he hosted a San Francisco party at which a starlet, Virginia Rappé, died. On no evidence, Arbuckle, who may have had sex with Rappé, was charged with her murder. (In my youth I read somewhere that the cause of death was the misapplication of a Coke bottle as a dildo!). He was eventually acquitted; the jury added to its verdict a heartfelt denunciation of his ordeal. But Will Hays, head of the industry’s new self-censorship office, banned Arbuckle from appearing in movies; he had become the Shoeless Joe Jackson of Hollywood. As his director Eddie Sutherland said: "Roscoe was destroyed by ambitious lawyers and some renegade people from Hollywood who gave him the worst of it when he’d given them the best of it."

Keaton’s decline would be less tragic but no less poignant. Talking pictures came in at the end of the decade, depriving him of the beautiful silent-film language he spoke so well. And MGM, his new studio, did not treat him well. Soon he was broke and alcoholic, his marriage to Schenck’s sister-in-law Natalie Talmadge in ruins. He was reduced to the lowliest job in movie comedy: gag man for gaudy farceurs like Red Skelton and Abbott and Costello. Of that pair (no Arbuckle and Keaton, they), Keaton spoke with barely contained fury. All they did was to show up on the set and read their lines. "Well, that used to get my goat," he says in a late film interview, his voice rising from exasperation into anger — "because, my God, when we made pictures we ate, slept and dreamed ’em."

In the Arbuckle-Keaton shorts, you get to see some of the earliest, earthiest slapstick two bright young men could dream up. The series will be a fond reminder for the fogie demographic. And for today’s kids, who think that movie comedy is a matter of applying raunchy meanings to hair gel and apple pie, it will be a remedial education in honest laughter.