Good Night Nurse

Fatty Arbuckle plays a wealthy lush whose wife ships him off to the asylum for a quick fix to alcoholism; Buster Keaton plays the blood-soaked doctor who steps straight out of the operating room to greet him. There's a lot of dark subject matter at play here, an odd concept for high-tempo slapstick comedy, but that's all quickly shuffled to the side in favor of a reckless pillow fight and another bout of cross-dressing. This must be the fourth time Fatty has donned a woman's wig and dress, flirting with a red-cheeked young gentleman, in the past year. Despite that one notable repetition, he and Keaton still provide a good batch of fresh, funny new material to fill out the rest of the show. It's quite scattered and the story is secondary at best, but the physical humor lands with consistency and that's really why we're here, right?

There is a pretty good variety of material in this short feature, with a lot of Arbuckle-style humor and also a more fanciful sequence of the kind that Keaton later refined and used in a lot of his own comedies. Here, the material is mostly unrefined, but it has some very good moments.

The opening sequence on the street corner starts to drag a little after a while, but things pick up when Arbuckle's wife sends him to a private sanitarium, where he meets up with Keaton and Alice Lake, resulting in some weird adventures. Keaton has some very funny moments in taking advantage of Arbuckle's confusion, and the dream sequence is quite imaginative.

Most Arbuckle/Keaton fans should find more than enough here to make "Good Night, Nurse!" enjoyable. Though much of it is a little unpolished, it has plenty of humor and energy.

There's an old phrase, "Good Night Nurse," so popular in the 1920's. The expression meant a disastrous or a surprise ending. It originated from Roscoe Arbuckle's July 1918 "Good Night, Nurse!" During one scene, Fatty disguises himself as a nurse trying to escape a sanitarium his wife had committed him to for his excessive drinking. When he's confronted by the hospital's head doctor, played by Buster Keaton, he begins to flirt like a fourth grader with him in the hallway. Keaton returns the shy mannerisms, creating a classic scene that is still talked about today.

One of the reasons Arbuckle was so impressed with Keaton is the synergy both created when they spent hours bouncing ideas off one another and expounded those jokes into a coherent, yet memorable progression of visual compositions on film. Keaton returned a year later after being honorably discharged from the Army, and appeared in a trio of films with Arbuckle before he was rewarded with his own film production unit under movie executive Joseph Schenck.

This is a typical Fatty Arbuckle vehicle, full of fast-paced slapstick. Much of the material is, typically for early silent comedy, rather unchoreographed mayhem: for example, 5 hospital staff members trying to move Arbuckle from a bed to a gurney, all 12 arms and legs jumping, flailing and falling. The faster everything moves, the better! However, there are several quite interesting moments in the film.

Firstly, at one point, Arbuckle, dressed as a nurse, flirts with Dr. Buster Keaton in a lengthy (over a minute) sequence; standing on opposite sides of a hallway, they make goo-goo eyes at each other, shyly fingering their own lips with their index fingers, and tracing sweet nothings in extreme embarrassment upon the walls near which they stand, respectively. It is interesting to see Keaton play a man smitten; his famous stone-face character of later solo films famously saw women only as necessary nuisances. More shockingly, at the end of the flirting scene, as Keaton and Arbuckle playfully push each other around, Keaton actually laughs - something we will never see him do on his own.

The funniest part of the movie is when the nearby town holds its annual "Fat Man Race". Within a minute, all the runners have fallen to the side of the road, exhausted - very funny. As can be expected, Arbuckle will accidentally fall into the race. At one point, a man paints the number "5" on a telephone pole. As expected, Arbuckle leans against the pole, and when he moves away, we see the number 5 on his back; now he really seems to be a part of the race. Bizarrely, the "5" does not appear on his back in reverse, as it should; the imprint from the pole has miraculously reversed itself!

Lastly, it may be noted that silent comedy had a penchant for sight gags that revolved around physical deformity and grotesqueness. At one point in this film, Arbuckle hands the end of a long hose to a local hick. The hick grins, showing off a vile looking orifice, filled with gum disease, but few teeth. Repulsive and pointless! Long live silent film comedy.

Roscoe Arbuckle stars as a man with alcohol addiction. His wife commits him to No Hope Sanitarium where they are greeted by the doctor wearing blood covered gown (Buster Keaton) and crazy female patient (Alice Lake). The film is quite loose on plot (like Arbuckle's movies usually), but this one is one of the most incoherent ones. That doesn't mean it is not funny or enjoyable. 'Good Night, Nurse!' is not so much of slapstick stuff, but it works rather as dark comedy. Still, one over the top sequence follows the other, until all the adventures get little bit unsatisfactory conclusion.

One interesting scene is where Arbuckle dresses up as female nurse and then starts to flirt with Buster Keaton's doctor. Scenes, where Buster smiles so long, are really rare. There are brief glimpses of his smile in some other movies, but in this movie, we don't see one bit of Keaton's usual stone face - he is thoughtful or smiling throughout the film.