Fatty Joins the Force

A couple walking in a park see a girl drowning in a lake. After rescuing the girl, the man discovers she is the daughter of the police commissioner and is rewarded with a job.

A simple short and sadly it produces very few laughs. The unexpected acrobatics from Roscoe Arbuckle, who stars as the man, provide the only highlights.

While quite uneven overall, this has some good slapstick and other gags, and it is also of interest as one of the earliest starring roles for Roscoe Arbuckle. It has a rather odd collection of material that leaves you wondering whether it was all supposed to be funny or not, as it is only amusing if you decide not to take it very seriously. Arbuckle's character is not especially sympathetic, yet he is treated rather roughly by the plot.

The story starts with 'Fatty' being rewarded for an act of heroism by being appointed to the police force, only to find how little respect policemen are often shown. The story mostly pieces together a series of stock elements, and they do not always fit together seamlessly. The clothes-stealing gag and some of the other ideas fall rather flat, but at other times Arbuckle's skill and timing make some of the slapstick work better than it might have on its own.

The main reason to watch this now would be to see Arbuckle, who shows that he could carry the action and handle a starring role, even when the material was not all that good. With a more nondescript actor in the lead, this movie would have been completely forgettable. It's still nothing great, but at least Arbuckle provides some reason for watching it.

Roscoe Arbuckle is walking in the park with girlfriend Dot Farley, when they spot a boy struggling in the lake. At Miss Farley's urging, Roscoe rescues him. It turns out to be the son of the police commissioner, who offers to put Arbuckle on the force. However, while taking a break by swimming in the same lake, four boys (including future screenwriter Lou Breslow) steal his uniform.

It's not among the best of the Keystones, but it does have the fast pacing and lightning cutting that the company was famous for. Among the cast is Edgar Kennedy, whose nasty mother-in-law Miss Farley would play in Kennedy's long-running "Common Man" comedy series for RKO from 1933 through 1948.

Roscoe Arbuckle is invited to join the police after saving the Commissioner's flighty daughter from drowning (cos that how they did things back then...) but proves to be less than competent. He may be light on his feet for a big man, but Arbuckle is something of a lightweight compared to his comic contemporaries. This poor comedy is thin on both ideas and laughs.

As Keystone comedies go, this is a pretty dark and disturbing piece of work. There's an amusing moment or two along the way, thanks largely to Roscoe Arbuckle's physical dexterity, but ultimately the story is more harrowing than funny, with an ending that's like something out of Kafka. And once you know the details of Arbuckle's tragic life and career the distressing impact of Fatty Joins the Force is only compounded.

Like so many Keystones this one begins in a park. Fatty and his wife encounter cop Edgar Kennedy, who apparently tosses off a sassy remark (about Roscoe's girth?) en route to a flirtation with a nursemaid. While the cop and the maid are chatting, the nurse's charge, a little girl, wanders off and then falls into the lake. Fatty comes to the rescue and saves the girl, who turns out to be the Police Commissioner's daughter. Fatty the hero is 'rewarded' with a position on the police force, but quickly gets into trouble. He falls afoul of a group of teenage boys who easily get the better of him. And then, due to a misunderstanding, the one-time hero is mistaken for a dangerous "wild man" and winds up in jail himself, disgraced and sobbing with frustration while his wife flirts with the Police Commissioner.

How funny is that finale? Not so funny, if you ask me. When you consider that, several years after this short comedy was produced, Arbuckle himself plummeted from a position of popularity and respect to genuine and lasting disgrace, the weepy close-up of Roscoe in his jail cell that concludes this film is far more upsetting than it might otherwise be. The most credible research indicates that Arbuckle was not guilty of any crime, but he was ruined and Hollywood was never the same, afterward. Of course, when this short was made all of that was far in the future, but it's difficult not to think of it while watching. The final close-up suggests an infamous composite photo that ran in the tabloids at the height of the scandal in 1921, showing a grim-faced Roscoe supposedly behind bars in San Francisco, facing rape and manslaughter charges. (The charges were real, all right, but the photo was faked.) Even taken on its own terms, Fatty Joins the Force is short on laughs. Roscoe executes a couple of funny falls, and reacts strenuously to a pie in the face, but otherwise, given the unhappy connotations, this movie is about as comical as Hitchcock's The Wrong Man.