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.
