Tu trembles, Fatty

The negative review of this little seen movie must come from somebody who is a huge Virginia Rappe fan. Leap Year is by no stretch a comic masterpiece but it has it's share of belly laughs. I didn't find that there was much jumping up and down and grimacing in front of the camera in this picture. Arbuckle is a very agile man who could pull off some nice stunts with the best of 'em. The compromising situations Arbuckle's character finds himself in is what sets the tone for the hilarity that ensues in Leap Year. Aside from this movie being shown in 1921 it hadn't been shown until some 60 years later. The picture has a beautiful tint to it and is recommended to fans of silent comedy.

Though this film is not his best work, still it's a shame that the scandal around Roscoe Arbuckle prevented Leap Year from being shown in America. It occurs to me that if this had been given a theatrical release it would have been eligible for an Oscar in the early Eighties.

I don't think it's that good, but I am reminded so much of Jackie Gleason when I watch Fatty Arbuckle. In this one Arbuckle is a silent version of Gleason's famous playboy Reggie Van Gleason. He's the nephew and heir of eccentric Lucien Littlefield and Arbuckle just seems to get tangled up with women just trying to be helpful.

One who he's not trying to be helpful to is Winnifred Greenwood who's the hatchet faced wife of cheating Clarence Geldart. She's almost as funny as poor Fatty.

Leap Year is worth taking that extra day and checking out the art of Roscoe Arbuckle.

Leap Year (1921)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Fatty Arbuckle plays a man who suffers from the sickness of falling in love with every woman he meets. This doesn't sit well with his fiancé when three other women show up to his house, all claiming to be his fiancé. This is a really poor film, the first feature I've seen from Arbuckle. Everything Fatty was good at is missing in this film and it seems like there wasn't any effort put into it. The only real highlight is when Fatty tries to scare off the three women by pretending to have violent fits. The most interesting thing was that this was made prior to Fatty being accused of murder. When he was accused, Hollywood put a ban on his films so this was never released until the early 1980's, nearly fifty years after his death.

Waiter's Ball, The (1916)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

A waiter and a cook (Fatty Arbuckle) fight over who will take a waitress to a dance.

There's some good stunt work inside the kitchen and Fatty has a few nice scenes with a dead fish but not all of the jokes work. The ending is very good however.

"Leap Year", starring Roscoe Arbuckle, was never released ... as it was about to be shipped to distributors when the scandal broke that destroyed Arbuckle's career. Tragically, the film was banned in Britain and several other nations during the furore over Arbuckle's alleged crimes. (He was eventually acquitted on all charges, yet the ban remained in place.) This film has a large production budget, some splendid location shots, and a witty script. "Leap Year" is excellent proof that Arbuckle was a major film star before his career came crashing down.

In "Leap Year", Roscoe is a wealthy Californian who just can't help attracting gorgeous women, even though he has a "steady girl". Considering Arbuckle's unromantic physique, we have to wonder how much of this female interest is directed towards his bank balance. There's one surprising shot in this movie, in which a man (not Arbuckle) enters a house through the bathroom window. He is clearly shown stepping onto the toilet seat, and using the toilet as a step to reach the floor. Film historians usually cite "The Crowd" (1928) as the first Hollywood movie to show a toilet, but "Leap Year" got there sooner.

One funny sequence, in which Roscoe tries to swim to Japan with his clothes on, shows Arbuckle's agility in the water. He was a very graceful man, despite his bulk. I give "Leap Year" 7 points.

In itself, this is an enjoyable light comedy with a lot of energy. It also represented something of a change of pace from Roscoe Arbuckle, both in attempting to expand his style of comedy into a full-length feature, and in emphasizing comedy ideas involving relationships and situations over and above pure slapstick. It's quite unfortunate that his career was ruined even before this could be released, and in particular this shows the kinds of possibilities that could have been in his future.

The story premise is not a lot different in style from the setup to many of Arbuckle's one- and two-reel features, just a little more complex. Arbuckle plays nephew to Lucien Litttlefield's grouchy uncle character, and Arbuckle's character is involved in all kinds of romantic difficulties; he's unable to work things out with the woman he really loves, and he's pursued by a number of others whom he doesn't love. All of these entanglements are set up in a light, fluffy way, and this part makes for pleasant comedy in itself.

In a shorter movie, the setup would most likely have been followed by a lot of slapstick and then a quick resolution, and indeed Roscoe and the cast could have done this without difficulty, since Arbuckle was an expert in working with that kind of format. But here, the story takes it in a more complicated and interesting direction, with the main character's predicament getting more complicated all the time, even as he resorts to various ruses. The last portion features a pleasantly manic unraveling of the tangled web that has developed, and it includes some witty ideas along with the slapstick.

This may not seem all that impressive now, because in the mid- to late 1920s the other silent comedy greats learned to master the full-length format, leading to many movies that are still among the all-time best comedies. Given the chance, Arbuckle could well have created his own comic gems over time. "Leap Year" is only good, not great, but it would have been a solid first step.