My own Arbucklean viewing has been the unfortunately OOP set The Forgotten Films of..., which I found at the local library. One startling thing about seeing these was finding out that one of my favorite gags from the later Coney Island was actually reused from one of these early Keystones. It's when he looks into the camera and asks the camera operator to tilt the camera upward so he can change pants in the offscreen space. It's the kind of direct use of the medium of cinema itself that we see later in some of Keaton's shorts without Arbuckle; it's hardly the kind of joke I would expect to see in a Sennett film.zedz wrote:Arbuckle / Keaton
I’ve worked my way through the first MoC disc, reacquainting myself with these fun, formative works. In general, it’s reinforced my earlier impression of the films, alluded to in my comments on Lloyd’s Ask Father. Most of the films are ‘first one thing, then another’ daisy chains of thematically related gags. There’s a set and a premise, and Arbuckle will explore one comic idea to its logical conclusion, then move on to the next, then find another, or if he can’t, change scenes or focus - as opposed to the more carefully constructed and interwoven strands of humour in the Lloyd film.
Of course, many of Arbuckle’s (and, increasingly, Keaton’s) comic ideas are brilliantly conceived and executed, but for me they rarely come together as a fully satisfying whole the way Keaton’s later shorts (or the contemporary Lloyds) do. But I’m certainly going to make an exception for Out West, which is a little more ambitious in its narrative structure than the preceding films and a lot more ambitious in its use of cinematic effects, particularly in the way Arbuckle will seamlessly blend purely physical comedy with camera tricks within a single gag or suite of gags. The (largely irrelevant to the rest of the film) opening sequence on the train is imaginative, audacious (Fatty grabbing ahold of the passing train at the last minute is a great moment) and pretty much perfectly paced and executed, and this is before we even get to Keaton, really starting to establish the boundaries of his screen persona.
Suffice it to say the 1913-1915 films are typical of the majority of Sennett films. They're not bad, but it really is remarkable how much of a leap in quality there was in every area after Roscoe got away from Sennett's influence and direct control. 1916 works like He Did and He Didn't and Waiters' Ball are just outstanding, as good as anything he appears in on the Keaton/Arbuckle set.
Of the latter collaborations, I want to put in a word for the underappreciated His Wedding Night, which I love mainly because it's so strange. In addition to the gags involving the drugging of women and policemen, we have a rare early example of the sissy who would of course later become a stock character. But as for strangeness, nothing beats the bit where Arbuckle puts his head under a mule's rear end and then allows the animal to sit on him... my god! It's not that it's one of Roscoe's best executed or even funniest gags, but so many of these early comedies are based on similar, often repetitive types of bits that I think it earns extra points for going that far into the bizarre.
