Tu trembles, Fatty

I watched Leap Year last night on TCM, expecting to see evidence of lost brilliance, since Arbuckle has been touted as a comic genius of the silent years. I was very disappointed. Notwithstanding his status in 1920, his performance in Leap Year simply does not age well. While much has been written about the impact the scandal had on Arbuckle's film career, it may be that his career probably would have died anyway. Let's be honest, jumping up and down and grimacing in front of the camera is about all he did in Leap Year (though he did have some nice acrobatics). Arbuckle is not a peer of Chaplin or Keaton. The scene where he "swims to Japan" is forgettable - there is nothing special there. In fact, the long shots suggest that perhaps he did not do his own diving. For a long time I wondered what was lost when Paramount destroyed "Gasoline Gus" and some of the other features they had in the "can" when the Arbuckle scandal broke. If Leap Year is any indication, I don't think that silent film fans are missing anything.

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.

Jeremiah Piper (Lucien Littlefield) is a grumpy old rich misogynist. His nephew Stanley Piper(Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle) is the apparent heir. He falls for his uncle's nurse Phyllis Brown (Mary Thurman). His uncle warned her about Stanley, but he intends to disprove the playboy accusation. It doesn't help that he gets pursued by various women.

I haven't seen that many Fatty Arbuckle films. I know that his career ended by some sort of unsavory scandal. He was supposedly a peer to the greatest silent film era comedians. He's basically a big guy who does a bit of physical comedy. At best, he's sort of like a Chris Farley without the innocence. The silent film era doesn't allow him to truly speak. He has a bit of physicality. I don't think that I laughed once for this movie.

Comedian director/writer and actor Roscoe Arbuckle had just signed a lucrative extension contract with Paramount Pictures in late summer of 1921 to produced 18 movies, making "Fatty" one of the highest paid people in Hollywood. To celebrate his signing, two friends arranged a party in San Francisco, reserving three hotel suites. Their guest list to the party included several actresses linked to the movie business.

One aspiring actress, 26-year-old Virginia Rappe, attended the September 5, 1921 ongoing celebration with a friend, Bambina Delmont. Rappe became sick and was throwing up in the toilet in Arbuckle's suite when the actor, he claimed, came in the room he was sharing with his friend to change his clothes. He carried her to his bed and asked friends for assistance in helping her. After a doctor had attended to her, she died two days later.

Normally her death would be treated as an accidental fatal illness attributed to her heavy drinking and her past addiction to drugs, alcohol and several abortions. But an aggressive state prosecutor who planned to run for California governor, and a press, especially newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, who saw a circulation stimulus right in his San Francisco backyard, chomped at the bit to indict and try Arbuckle in a salacious trial. The two forces were motivated by Ms. Delmont, a known grifter, extortionist and fraudster, who claimed Roscoe raped her friend in the most graphic terms.

Arbuckle underwent a grueling three-trial ordeal on manslaughter charges. The first trial, beginning on November 14, 1921, ended in a hung jury, with a 10-2 acquittal vote. The second trial, on January 11, 1922, with new evidence by Arbuckle's lawyers rebutting several claims of the prosecutor, didn't feel a need to put the actor on the stand, so convincing was their defense. That was a big mistake since the jury felt his refusal to personally testify was a sign of guilt and voted 10-2 to convict, still a hung jury verdict.

Arbuckle's team of lawyers decided to come into the third trial, held on March 13, 1922, with all guns ablazing. Unveiling the prosecution witnesses' dubious pasts and Rappe's sordid background, as well as Roscoe's convincing recollection of that September event on the witness stand, the jury unanimously decided on a not-guilty verdict. In fact, its members took a very unusual step in reading a prepared statement that "a great injustice has been done him..We wish him success and hope that the American people will take the judgment of fourteen men and woman who have sat listening for thirty-one days to evidence, that Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from all blame."

Unfortunately, because of the constant drumbeat of the press, an event where Hearst saw his chain of newspapers' circulation skyrocket writing in lurid, wildly-exaggerated detail of the Rappe's death, the public didn't see it that way. The movie industry was so shaken by the Arbuckle scandal along with religious organizations calling for federal censorship of movies, its members created the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA). One of its functions was to self-censor its members' movies and lobby various state censor boards not to ban certain films. The new organization was headed by the former Postmaster General, William Hays. Six days after Fatty's not-guilty verdict, Hays banned him from ever working in movies again. In December 1922, once the hysteria died down and the public realized the innocence of Arbuckle, Hays lifted the ban.

Roscoe by that time was a broken man. He was heavily in debt from paying over $700,000 (in 1922 dollars) for lawyer fees, his wife divorced him and movie studios shunned him. He did direct several movies under the pseudonym "William Goddrich," but never attained the popularity he once enjoyed.

The eight months in 1921 before the incident that changed his life, Arbuckle made an aggressive seven feature films for Paramount movies. The movies were planned to be slowly released to the pubic in the fall of 1921, but by that time theater owners refused to show them. Paramount didn't save any of the prints of those feature films he made that year. Some were shown in Europe and the prints belong in private hands. The only viewable movie to the general public of the seven he made that year is "Leap Year." It gives an indication of the direction Arbuckle was heading by the dampening of the knockabout physicality of his humor for a more sublime comedy sustaining an hour's plot. He plays a nephew of a rich uncle who's hounded by women knowing his wealthy background. But Fatty is focused in on his only true love, which he's loyal to a fault. The untimely death of Rappe and the subsequent publicity and trials of Arbuckle begs the question of how Arbuckle's farcical maturity would have produced further classics he was capable of producing, and serves as one of cinema's greater tragic missing chapters.

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.