La casa tempestosa

Housekeeping chaos for a well-off homeowner, his small cooking/cleaning staff and a visiting party of refined dinner guests with ulterior motives. As with most slapstick comedies of the day, it only takes a little nudge to transition from a sleepy ho-hum day around the house into a full-blown food fight with smoke in the air and a never-ending parade of head-over-heels pratfalls. This one spirals out of control in a hurry, with Fatty Arbuckle setting the bedroom ablaze before he's had his morning coffee and Buster Keaton flopping flat on his back twice in his first sixty seconds, then snowballs until Arbuckle is gleefully empying a gun into his own kitchen door while Keaton hurls butcher knives at the chef.

Honestly, there's very little to The Rough House beyond sight gags and ever-increasing stakes in a high rollers' game of physical one-upsmanship, but it's a riot when it's in the groove. Arbuckle and Keaton's brands of expressive comedy are compatible and complimentary, and their constant efforts to out-goof each other lead to increasingly rich rewards for the viewer. It doesn't mean much of anything, but it's a hilarious way to kill half an hour.

'The Rough House' that marks the directorial debut of Buster Keaton and is his second collaboration with Fatty Arbuckle, falls flat. The most amusing part is in the beginning of the movie where Arbuckle's character nonchalantly tries to put out a fire with cup of water. From there on the film goes downhill. Repetitive gags of someone getting hit int the face with stuff (I know it is slapstick and pie in the face was widely used gag, but this time they did it too much). Too random, too messy and too noisy (for silent film).

The Rough House, a Roscoe Arbuckle short featuring Buster Keaton in a supporting role in just his second film, isn't exactly sophisticated when it comes to humor. A lot of the comedy consists of people falling down or being knocked down. By my count, Buster alone hit the deck 11 times in his first 3 and a half minutes on the screen, over 3 times a minute. There are a few exceptions though, like Arbuckle using forks stuck into bread rolls to emulate a simple little dance, something Charlie Chaplin surely saw and improved on in The Gold Rush eight years later. That's at the 3:41 point and probably this film's best moment, but it's brief. Arbuckle also cleverly uses a fan as a potato slicer in the kitchen and a sponge to squeeze soup into the bowls of diners as a waiter, and I wish there had more riffs on this sort of thing. The film also seems choppy in a few places, usually around moments when women are falling, being groped, or kissed, suggesting to me that the surviving print may have been a victim to a local censorship board. Regardless, it's not very remarkable, and maybe only worth checking out for the dinner roll bit.

Rough House, The (1917)

*** (out of 4)

Fatty Arbuckle helps run a seaside resort but trouble starts when a deliver boy (Buster Keaton) shows up. It's rather amazing to see how much time the star/director Fatty gave to Keaton who's allowed to steal the show with his physical comedy. Another interesting thing is that there's a dinner scene where Fatty puts forks in two rolls and does a dance, which Chaplin borrowed eight years later in The Gold Rush.

Butcher Boy, The (1917)

** (out of 4)

The butcher boy (Fatty Arbuckle) falls for the store owner's daughter and must fight to get her. The first half of the film takes place in the store and has Buster Keaton playing an obnoxious customer. This half is very funny but the second half dealing with Fatty dressing in drag in order to sneak into a boarding school really doesn't work.

Haven't seen much of Arbuckle since I was a kid and, on the evidence of this effort, I haven't really missed much. I can't help wondering how famous Arbuckle's name would be today had his career not been destroyed by the Virginia Rappe affair. Probably as famous as Larry Semon, who was also big in the silent era but is now all but forgotten - and with good reason.

Arbuckle is outshone in every scene by his sidekick, Buster Keaton. This was only Keaton's second film but his technique is already far in advance of Fatty's. The story is non-existent, merely a prop on which to hang the relentless stream of pratfalls and sight gags. That's OK if the gags are funny and their execution spot on, but only Keaton is getting it right, so the laughs are few and far between. As others have pointed out already, its Fatty's lackadaisical attempts to put out a fire and his sausage-on-a-fork dance, which pre-empts Charlie the tramp's more famous version by a good seven years, that rise above the mediocre.