Il garzone di macelleria

This Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle comedy is best remembered for featuring a young Buster Keaton, fresh from splitting with his family's roughhouse Vaudeville act, in his film debut. Buster gets quite a substantial part in this film and it's quite a funny one overall. "The Butcher Boy" has lots of laughs and is an example of pure old-fashioned slapstick done well, though it would seem to come from the brief era of two-reel comedies when filmmakers still imagined in one-reel segments as a matter of course.

The first half of the film takes place in a general store, with Arbuckle as the the butcher boy of the title. It's an excuse to mine the many possibilities for fast physical humor that a general store provides, and Arbuckle really shows himself to be a 300-pound acrobat, demonstrating subtlety, skill, and grace in his performance of what might have been unremarkable slapstick routines that raise them to a different level. A running gag has him flipping a large butcher knife casually so that it spins accurately into it's proper position stuck into the cutting board, and I'm still stunned that Arbuckle really seems to do it each time. There's also a really nice gag that sees him leaning on his scale and confused as to why his cuts of meat weigh so much.

Buster Keaton is a boy who comes into to buy some molasses, and performs deftly in a foot-stuck-to-floor routine that follows. Apart from the odd and almost unsettling half-smile, his idiosyncratic attitude and body language make him recognizable immediately as the Buster we know. He even has his eventually-trademarked flattened hat -- here destroyed for the first time when filled, of course, with molasses.

The second half of the film moves into more situation-based comedy and Arbuckle and his rival Al St. John dress in drag to infiltrate Fatty's girlfriend's boarding school. A lot of the humor also comes from the generally surreal and mysteriously laugh-inducing sight of these two odd fellows wearing drag and trying to "be girls." buster is in this segment too, but mostly stands there in the occasional cutaway, helping St. John.

The ending of "The Butcher Boy" becomes a little emptily frenetic, but on the whole and beyond its historical curiosity interest, it's a well-done comedy that gets just the knockabout laughs it is going for.

While everyone knows that this is Buster Keaton's debut into movies and a taste of genius to come, I find the most incredible fact is that at the start of the day this movie was filmed Buster had no plans to go into movies, he was, in fact, about to start work in a New York theatrical show. He was invited to work on the film by Fatty and basically improvised his very first scene with the props to hand, in this case a barrel of brushes, he had never been in front of a movie camera before and in those days there was very little rehearsal, proof of his natural ability for the moving picture medium.

This is a typical Arbuckle slapstick, very frenetic, but, lots of fun, but, it is mainly a curiousity as it was Keaton's debut. An interesting thing to do is watch all Keaton/Arbuckle movies in the order they were made and see Keaton's increasing influence on them, a real taste of things to come when Keaton was making his own movies.

By the way, as usual Luke the dog comes very close to stealing all the scenes he's in.

The way Buster Keaton told it, his first encounter with Roscoe Arbuckle happened by chance on a rainy day in New York in March, 1917. Having recently left his family's act The Three Keatons, he accepted Arbuckle's invitation to come do a scene in The Butcher Boy, and the rest, as they say, is history.

In the first half of the film, we meet Arbuckle, a butcher who is light on his feet and gracefully slides over the countertop, or easily maneuvers around the shop on a mounted wall ladder on wheels. He casually flicks a cut of meat over his back to have it land on a hook, and tosses his knife into the air to have it land embedded into the board. These are the same kinds of things we would see from Keaton in later films. Meanwhile, the shop's dog Luke runs on a giant treadmill to grind pepper, which was a funny contraption, and probably the film's best gag.

It's at the 6:25 mark that Buster shows up, and after sampling some molasses that he's wiped off the bottom of his shoe, decides to buy some. Arbuckle, Keaton, and sticky molasses - you can clearly see that hijinks are coming. Keaton's money gets stuck in the bottom of the bucket, his hat gets stuck on his head, his foot gets stuck on his floor, etc. The butcher has eyes for the shop manager's daughter (Alice Lake), but she's also being pursued by Slim, the store's clerk, and the two of them get into a fight over her, resulting in bags of flour being hurled all over the store, Keaton (naturally) joining in the fray. Gags with sticky goo and food fights have been done countless times over the 106 years since this was made so it's not going to wow anyone today, but it's watchable, and seeing this pair in their earliest scenes together was special.

In the second half of the film, in response to the brawling, the father sends his daughter away to a boarding school where no men are allowed. To get around this rule, Arbuckle dresses up as a girl and meets with the teacher to enroll. Unfortunately, his rival has the same idea, and they end up in the same room with her. The gags that result, including the two men fighting, Arbuckle being spanked by the teacher, and Slim and his accomplices (including Buster) attempting to kidnap the young woman, aren't all that funny, relying more on the novelty at the time of the men in drag than anything else. The teacher wielding a gun and good boy Luke helping Arbuckle get the girl was cute though. Overall, it's certainly not great, but not bad either, and it got bonus points from me for it being Keaton's first film.

The early two reelers of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and his young apprentice Buster Keaton offer a rare opportunity to glimpse the genesis of Keaton's soon to become indelible comic persona, but beyond their not inconsiderable academic interest each is also a lot of fun. When they first met, Arbuckle was an established star while Keaton was only a vaudeville performer with little knowledge of the embryonic movie business, but all that changed when Fatty invited him onto the set of 'The Butcher Boy', and from their first moment on screen together the rapport between the two comedians is instantly apparent. Neither makes any attempt to out-stage the other and their talents are remarkably well matched, with Arbuckle the rotund but surprisingly graceful lead and Keaton (among others) as the acrobatic foil who took the pratfalls. Like all the early Arbuckle/Keaton comedies, 'The Butcher Boy' is loose, unstructured, unsophisticated, spontaneous, primitive, completely informal, and made in the same fun spirit in which they were meant to be seen.

This Fatty Arbuckle short feature is a historical treasure in that it was the first film appearance of the great Buster Keaton, and it has some decent slapstick too. The first half takes place in the general store where 'Fatty' is working as the "Butcher Boy", and it has some good moments, with a couple of clever gadgets, although no big laughs. The last half is the best part, with Fatty, Buster, Fatty's frequent foil Al St. John, and their dog all converging on a boarding school, in a manic sequence that includes some good material. It's unrefined, old-fashioned slapstick, but good fun for anyone who enjoys Arbuckle and/or Keaton.