Leap Year

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.