by Ellen Dawson
The viewer is consequently required to reevaluate that action—in which the husband throttles his wife and throws her former boyfriend out a window—
as the subjective projection of the two dreamers: at once the revenge fantasy of a husband suspicious of his wife’s infidelity and the paranoid projection of a former lover fearful of the husband’s wrath. As Mabel Normand, Arbuckle’s co-star, proudly announced in an interview at the time, the film was “just a little bit different from most of the comedies we have been doing because it really had a plot” (Sherman 21).
It would be wrong, however, to overstate the significance of narrative with respect to Arbuckle’s filmmaking ambitions. Alongside such complex experiments as He Did and He Didn’t, Arbuckle also espoused the value of plotless “gagging” and a spontaneous, improvisational approach to comic
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form. “A comedy scenario isn’t like a drama,” Arbuckle admitted in a Motion Picture Classic interview. “We have nothing but the skeleton of a plot to work on, and fill it out with our gags.” Asked for the significance of the word
“gag,” Arbuckle elaborated: “A gag is a piece of by-play which has no direct connection with the plot” (Robert S. Moore, “Feeding with Fatty Arbuckle,”
Motion Picture Classic, n.d., 46). Elsewhere, he denied ever filming from pre-prepared scenarios: “I make up my own plays,” he commented. “I don’t write them, I make them up as I go along. . . . I try out every scene I can think of, working out the business by actually rehearsing it. And all the time I’m rehearsing out there, I’m trying to devise the funny little twists that will get a laugh” (Neibaur 37–38). Such comments testify to the variability of Arbuckle’s comic style during this period: an emphasis upon physical “by-play” and “funny little twists” was always an objective of his comedy, yet this ran parallel to—and occasionally competed with—the more complex narrational procedures elsewhere evidenced in his filmography.4 Thus a refined situation comedy like That Little Band of Gold could be followed two months later by the sheer physicality of Miss Fatty’s Seaside Lovers (May 1915), a film primarily designed to showcase Arbuckle cavort-ing in a woman’s bathing suit. Likewise, in his later Comique films, the character-based rural comedy The Hayseed (October 1919) was followed immediately by the broader comic style of The Garage (October 1919), a film principally structured around a disconnected series of gag sequences, thus puzzling and disappointing reviewers who criticized his return to “slapstick methods” (Neibaur 155). While this variability testifies to Arbuckle’s interest in the different dimensions of comic form—both its gag-based and plot-driven variants—it also goes some way toward explaining why he ultimately failed to win the imprimatur of sustained genteel approval, at least in comparison with the status accorded Chaplin. “No one will accuse Mr. Arbuckle of elevating the film art,” charged a critic for the middlebrow magazine Motion Picture. “While there are many clever and ingenious devices and incidents in all of the Arbuckle farces, I would say that while Chaplin is a genius, Arbuckle is merely a clown” (Neibaur 128).
2. Comic Persona and Rural Comedy: It is a critical commonplace that Arbuckle failed to develop a single or consistent comic persona along the lines of Chaplin’s tramp or Harold Lloyd’s “glass” character, instead choosing to streamline his performances into several broad types—the philandering husband ( Fatty’s Chance Acquaintance, March 1915), the flirtatious young man ( Fatty’s Faithful Fido, March 1915); even, on occasion, the disheveled tramp ( Fatty’s New Role, February 1915). More distinctive, however, was
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Keystone publicity flaunts Arbuckle’s various characterizations. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Arbuckle’s “country boy” persona, and here too a link can be made with discourses of comic respectability.
Arbuckle’s interest in rural characterizations dates to the very beginning of his directing career—his first film as a director, Barnyard Flirtations, although no longer extant, was reviewed as a “rough and tumble” farmer’s
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daughter comedy—and would recur in several of his early self-directed films, such as Those Country Kids (August 1914) and Lovers’ Post Office (November 1914) ( Moving Picture World, 4 April 1914, 58). Such settings and character types were, of course, no innovation of Arbuckle’s: the rural clown or
“rube” had long been a stock figure of vaudeville and comic strips, and early filmmakers had seized upon the encounter of rural folk with modern technology as one of their earliest comic themes (as in Edison’s Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show [1902] or Rube and Mandy at Coney Island [1903]). This tension between country life and technological modernity carries through into Arbuckle’s rural comedies, particularly in the “Fatty and Mabel” series that began in early 1915, pairing Arbuckle with Keystone’s leading comedienne, Mabel Normand. Repeatedly, in that series, a young, often rural couple enters into farcical negotiation with the forces of progress, whether in the form of their comic encounters with world’s fair exhibits in Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition (January 1915), with an errant and uncontrollable automobile in Fatty and Mabel’s Simple Life (January 1915), or with the modern conveniences of their new cottage in Fatty and Mabel Adrift (January 1916) (Keeler).
More uniquely characteristic of Arbuckle’s work in this tradition, however, was his ability to transform the rube, a stock figure of fun, into a more complex character, capable of mobilizing shifting patterns of empathy and ridicule, compassion and derision. “The secret of Arbuckle’s popularity,”
commented Motion Picture News, “is the fact that he makes his audiences laugh at him as well as with him, never fearing to be made the victim of a joke himself, instead of insisting upon always being the one who plays the tricks upon others” (“Arbuckle to Act and Direct for Paramount,” 7 January 1917, 541). Applied to rural settings, the trajectory of Arbuckle’s comedy was thus to reverse the dynamics of rube humor for urban audiences, to present the country boy less as a figure of social maladjustment than as a vehicle for identification, even for a kind of preindustrial nostalgia. Fatty and Mabel’s Simple Life, for instance, begins as a lightly comic idyll of young love:
“She was happy,” declares the opening intertitle that introduces Mabel, who is seen playing with a calf; “Poor but honest,” announces the next, as Fatty comically endeavors to protect his milk pail from a thirsty cow. The opening of Fatty and Mabel Adrift (January 1916) similarly establishes an idealized bucolic setting, while also exhibiting the formal playfulness characteristic of Arbuckle’s work from this period. The film begins with a (literally) rose-tinted shot of rolling hills, over which the image of a heart is superimposed. Before the narrative proper commences, a prologue depicts the romance as sentimental abstraction: Fatty and Mabel are introduced
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In Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916), the characters are introduced through heart-framed, cameo-style close-ups. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
through heart-framed, cameo-style close-ups, their heads isolated against black backgrounds, and Cupid’s arrow is shown bringing the two lovers together. “It was ingenious,” commented Photoplay’s review of the film, “it was sensational, it was clean, and it was always funny” (“The Shadow Stage,”
April 1916, 148).
Biographers have hypothesized that this bucolic strain might be traced to Arbuckle’s memories of his childhood in Smith Center, Kansas. (As an adult, he wistfully recalled the “tin soldiers, toy locomotives, candy, ice cream cones and popcorn balls” that made Christmas in Kansas, “when I was only five or six years of age, a good little boy,” beyond compare [Young 8].) However, Arbuckle’s rural comedies signified more than merely personal nostalgia. In a way that characterized other developments in film comedy from the mid-1910s onward—in, for instance, Seli
g’s Chronicles of Bloom Center series (1915–1916) or the Betzwood Company’s later Toonerville Trolley films (1920–1922)—the bucolic evocation of rural settings served Arbuckle’s films as a token of refinement, substituting the ideological systems of small-town nostalgia for the “vulgar,” plebeian dynamics of knockabout comedy.
The obvious sentimentalism implicit in Arbuckle’s pastoral retrospect thus positioned his comedies at odds with the sensationalism more typical of Keystone’s output and brought them closer to genteel, literary standards of
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humor. Arbuckle himself seems to have realized this, explaining in a syndicated interview that “the rural atmosphere is one that never fails to have its humorous appeal,” while middlebrow critics responded in kind, celebrating his rural comedies for a “genuine humanity” that transcended “tried and true slapstick.” “Fatty belongs in subjects of rural life,” declared the fan magazine Motion Picture in the late fall of 1919. “He is supreme in delineating the country yokel and in his treatment of the character he has always approached the bull’s eye of truth” (Neibaur 71, 155).
3. Visual Style and Pictorialism: “Do you know that . . . Mr. Arbuckle is one of the greatest of comedy directors?” (“Plays and Players,” Photoplay, December 1915, 160). This question, posed shortly before the comedian’s move to Fort Lee at the end of 1915, is one of several indications that Arbuckle’s stardom was gradually being redefined to include his talents behind the camera, as well as in front. While fan magazines still happily ran feature profiles on Arbuckle’s fatness, they now also insisted on his creative authority as simultaneously director, writer, and performer. “‘Fatty’ Arbuckle ranks today uniquely in the field of comic productions and possesses the added faculty of directing the pictures in which he stars,” noted Motion Picture News, continuing: “The fact that Arbuckle directs his own pictures is important because he will set tasks for himself to do that no other director would have the moral courage to ask him to perform” (“Arbuckle to Act and Direct for Paramount,” 7 January 1917, 541).
Of course, Arbuckle was hardly unique as a comic star who also directed; among his peers, Chaplin was already gaining a reputation by mid-decade as a “serious, systematic” director, notorious for extensive retakes and his total control over actors (Harry Carr, “Charlie Chaplin’s Story—Conclusion,”
Photoplay, October 1915, 97–98). Still, there were differences: whereas Chaplin’s authorship was understood at this stage primarily in terms of his distinction as a performer, Arbuckle defined the validity of his directorial signature through a distinctive visual pictorialism, shaping a mise-en-scène that accorded with traditional, painterly standards of art. A brief consideration of contemporary reviews clearly illustrates the centrality of lighting effects in Arbuckle’s attempts to legitimize himself as a director: beginning in the fall of 1914, critics for Moving Picture World frequently singled out Arbuckle’s films for praise in this respect, pointing out that particular titles were “well photographed” ( Fatty’s Debut, September 1914) and describing the cinematography as “very fine” ( That Little Band of Gold, 13 March 1915, 1615) and “excellent”
( Fatty and Minnie-He-Haw, 12 December 1914, 1525). Arbuckle likewise insisted on the value of a pictorial approach, as he reflected in one interview:
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“I have always thought there was room for beautiful scenic achievements in comedy as well as the kick and the custard pie” (Neibaur 15). By late 1915, he was giving full rein to visual aestheticism, experimenting with staging in depth, color tinting and toning, and low-key lighting and shadow play.5
There can be few examples of Arbuckle’s pictorial artistry as evocative as the famous “shadow kiss” from Fatty and Mabel Adrift—in which the comedian’s shadow falls over Mabel and “kisses” her on the lips—a scene that prompted producer Hobart Bosworth to write the comedian:
You manage to infuse these things with a genuine and very pure sentiment that leavens all the mass of farcical action, and I don’t know how you do it. I lay much of it to your own personality which is wholesome and decent. Your touch is so sure, and right in the midst of some uproarious situation, you give a touch that is as full of poetry and sentiment as anything I ever saw. Many times since I saw “Adrift” I have said that the business of the shadowy good-night kiss was the most touchingly poetic thing I have ever seen in a motion picture.
(Oderman 92)
Two aspects of this remarkable passage should be emphasized. First, the terms of Bosworth’s praise overtly align Arbuckle’s pictorialism with established concepts of artistry. “Pure sentiment,” “full of poetry and sentiment,”
“touchingly poetic”: these are terms commensurate with the sacralized realm of genteel aesthetics. Second, and perhaps more significantly, we begin to see how Arbuckle’s directing style was provoking a substantive redefinition of comic creativity in film. As Henry Jenkins has shown, the tradition of vaudeville comedy from which slapstick derived typically prioritized the performer as the chief creative force, emphasizing the individual comic actor’s ability to “stop the show” or “command the stage” (Jenkins 63–69). Arbuckle’s authorship, by contrast, uniquely relocated comic creativity away from the performing body, making him arguably the first film comedian to be discussed seriously as a director.
By the time Arbuckle announced his decision to leave Keystone in late 1916, his stardom was situated ambiguously between cultural vectors. His interest in the cerebral pleasures of narrative games (“comedies that make you think”), the pastoralist nostalgia of his rural comedies (“the bull’s eye of truth”), and his developing pictorialism as a director (“very pure sentiment”) stood in tension with his identity as “Fatty,” binding his stardom to competing regimes, the fully embodied realm of popular comedy versus the quintessentially dis embodied realm of “true” culture—again, “Roscoe” versus “Fatty.” For some writers at the time, Arbuckle became an object of fascination precisely as such a hybrid, a conflation of cultural categories that, as noted earlier, led commentators to frame his work in terms of a
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brain/body distinction. It was at this point, for instance, that interviewers began to speak of the “size of his brains” as well as the “size of his stom-ach,” of his “brains as well as bulk,” or, as previously quoted, of his “brain as well as his weight-ridden physique.”
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✩ Star versus Scapegoat:
Arbuckle at Paramount and Beyond
Arbuckle was thus able to play a catalytic role in slapstick’s broadening popularity because he managed to fuse low comedy with genteel cultural registers. As 1916 came to an end, those efforts were rewarded when he was approached by Joseph Schenck to enter into a contract with the Paramount Pictures Corporation. According to that arrangement, Arbuckle would take the reins as head of his own producing company, the Comique Film Corporation, with total artistic control over his pictures and a salary of $1,000 per day plus 25 percent of the gross profits. Since the two-reel comedies would be distributed on the open market—allowing all exhibitors to book the films regardless of contract—a nationwide banquet tour was scheduled to introduce the comedian to theater owners in person.
The Paramount Pictures Corporation had, from its founding in 1914, preached the rhetoric of film industry uplift, and Arbuckle wasted no time reminding exhibitors of his commitment to similar values: “Nothing has ever pleased me so much as has the signing of the contract for the distribution of my future pictures by Paramount,” Arbuckle commented in January. “I can only assure you and Paramount that my future pictures will be of a far higher caliber and funnier than ever” (“Arbuckle Leaves Keystone,”
Motion Picture News, 3 February 1917, 745). Exhibitor requests for the films flooded Paramount’s exchanges. Shortly before the rele
ase of the first Comique production, The Butcher Boy, on April 23, it was reported that two thousand contracts had already been signed, with 150 for first-run rights to the films. “Where it had originally been thought seventy-five prints for the production would be needed,” said Motion Picture News, “there is expectation that over two hundred prints will be necessary by time of first release”
(“Arbuckle Comedy Contracts Flood Paramount,” 28 April 1917, 2661).
Indeed, so popular did the films prove that, by the time Arbuckle released Back Stage (1919), some exhibitors were playing the Comiques as their feature attractions, not simply as comic support (Neibaur 139).
Arbuckle’s series of nineteen shorts for Paramount have been described, with good reason, as the culmination of his filmic achievement (Neibaur 4).