Leading Lizzie Astray

Leading Lizzie Astray (1914)

** (out of 4)

Keystone comedy has a city boy's car breaking down in the country where he talks a young woman in running off with him to the city. All is fine until her boyfriend (Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle) finds out and comes looking for her. LEADING LIZZIE ASTRAY is a major disappointment when you consider all of the talent it has in it. Not only do you get Arbuckle but Minta Durfee plays the girl and we get supporting bits with Charley Chase, Al St. John and Edgar Kennedy. I will at least give this film credit for trying to tell a story, which is something a lot of these Keystone films didn't even bother with. This one here should have made for some great jokes as you had the city going against the country but they never did anything with this. There's really not even much attempt at making any comedy until the very end when the city boy starts to attack the girl just as Arbuckle shows up to stop it. The majority of the movie features very little in regards to action or laughs, which is a shame because of the cast.

Leading Lizzie Astray, one of the many Fatty Arbuckle shorts produced for the film company Keystone, opens with a city slicker (Ed Brady) driving through town when his car gets a flat tire. A local boy (Arbuckle) and his fiancée (Minta Durfee), who happen to walk by, lend a hand to the man, who proceeds to try and pick up the boy's fiancée. The man attempts to get the woman to venture back to town with her, an offer she accepts, for she sees the glamor of the city being more attractive than her options at home, much to the dismay of the boy. Depressed and lonely, the boy attempts to win back his wife by venturing into the big city.

Leading Lizzie Astray gets a lot of early silent filmmaking conventions down right, from the quick editing to the cheap but effective special effects (there's a great scene of a piano crashing into a wall), but forgets the magic of the formula that this story provides. When the local boy travels to the city, he is a fish walking on land, and Arbuckle, who serves as writer/director here, forgets to incorporate that kind of alienation into his story. It's a frustrating feature, and it could've saved the film from being an assembly of slapstick comedy.

Early Keystone shorts were known for their scuzzy aesthetic and bare-bones plot, yet some quality standard has to be achieved with these films. Arbuckle is one of several early comedians who never got his recognition, mostly due to a murder allegation, and with that, Leading Lizzie Astray is one that was inevitably swept under the rug as one of his weaker offerings.

Starring: Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Minta Durfee, and Ed Brady. Directed by: Roscoe Arbuckle.

Yes, this is the one where Fatty throws a piano through the wall! A minor story with major mayhem involved in its conclusion, this short is a farcical version of Country Mouse, City Mouse. The second half is set in a speak-easy, which is shot using an evidentially long-forgotten vaudeville technique (maybe?) of having a dozen actors doing comic characters on the sides and behind the main action, simultaneously upstaging each other and breaking all the rules of "good cinema" (like the prizefighting scene of "The Knock-Out"). Very stage-like, but whatever its origin, the effect is astonishing to a modern viewer. I've watched about a dozen Arbuckle shorts and each one has different aspects of strangeness and hilarity. They're all good and worth seeing. This one has more violence than a dozen episodes of "The Sopranos". How can Fatty be so vicious and lovable at the same time? Fascinating stuff!

For such a simple, knockabout slapstick feature, the cast list for this movie contains a surprising number of well-known silent movie performers, even in the minor roles. Roscoe Arbuckle, Charley Chase, and Mack Swain all give it an over-the-top effort that makes the material work about as well as it possibly could have. The story and the comedy ideas are nothing special for the most part, so it relies on the cast's energy and talent to make things work.

Arbuckle plays the kind of likable rube figure found in a number of his earlier movies, and here he has to protect his fiancée (Minta Durfee) from a smooth operator who wants to take her to the city. It starts with a flat tire sequence that has some remarkable similarities to the sequence in the classic "Mabel and Fatty Adrift", and it's a good scene. After that, most of it is broadly played slapstick. Swain and Chase show up a little later, as two boisterous miners who add an extra dose of chaos to the conflicts between the main characters.

The supporting cast also includes Edgar Kennedy, Al St. John, and several others in smaller roles. They all have plenty of energy, and while it's nothing remarkable, this is the kind of feature that is enjoyable to watch simply as a taste of its era.