Fatty à la clinique

I tend to enjoy the comedies made by Buster Keaton and Roscoe Arbuckle during Buster's movie-making apprenticeship, but I can also see how they may not be to everyone's taste. Compared to Buster's later solo work these early films are primitive in technique and content, haphazardly structured, and at times vulgar, but even so, at their best they have a wild unpredictability and a kind of loopy charm that grows on you after you've seen a few of them. You never know where the story is going, and you sense that the filmmakers didn't know either, that they were making up everything as they went along, and this quality can be refreshing and exhilarating. Usually, anyhow.

I first saw Good Night, Nurse! as part of a Keaton retrospective at NYC's Film Forum in the early 1990s, but the print shown on that occasion was in poor condition and obviously incomplete, so much so that the story was incoherent. At one point I even wondered if the surviving pieces of the film had been spliced back together in the wrong sequence. Now that the movie has been restored from better components for its DVD release, I realize it was a bizarre piece of work to begin with, a dark comedy with a very loose plot that unfolds like a disjointed dream.

The film begins with an extended storm sequence. We find a drunken Roscoe teetering about in front of a corner drug store, trying to light a cigarette in the wind. (Watch closely as a woman with an umbrella is blown Roscoe's way by the storm -- that's Buster in drag!) When Roscoe finally makes his way home, bringing along an Italian organ-grinder, a gypsy dancer, and a trained monkey, his long-suffering wife decides that an intervention is in order, and checks Roscoe into the No Hope Sanitarium. There we meet crazed inmate Alice Lake, Al St. John in a dual role as both a doctor and a patient swathed in bandages, and most strikingly of all, young Buster Keaton as Dr. Hampton, who suavely enters the operating room in a bloody smock, sharpening a pair of steak knives. Soon Roscoe has swallowed a thermometer, provoked a frenzied pillow fight among the patients, and donned a nurse's uniform to flirt with Dr. Hampton. If you've never seen Buster smile on screen, check out the flirtation sequence here, where he matches Roscoe grin-for-grin. Eventually, Roscoe escapes from the sanitarium and everyone winds up outside, participating for a cross-country marathon race. (Again, it feels like a dream: "Then suddenly we were all outside, running a marathon," etc.) The race sequence is topped with a final surprise twist that isn't actually much of a surprise, but it wraps up the whole imbroglio on an appropriately weird, anti-climactic note. What were you expecting after all that, a real ending?

In his autobiography Buster devotes a lot of space to the elaborate practical jokes he and his good pal Roscoe Arbuckle used to cook up, when they were on top of the world and full of youthful high spirits. Good Night, Nurse! captures the flavor of those heady days as well as any movie they made together. It may not be their best comedy, but it has a wacky, prankster-like quality that's quite appealing for those willing to go along for the ride.

Fatty Arbuckle plays a wealthy lush whose wife ships him off to the asylum for a quick fix to alcoholism; Buster Keaton plays the blood-soaked doctor who steps straight out of the operating room to greet him. There's a lot of dark subject matter at play here, an odd concept for high-tempo slapstick comedy, but that's all quickly shuffled to the side in favor of a reckless pillow fight and another bout of cross-dressing. This must be the fourth time Fatty has donned a woman's wig and dress, flirting with a red-cheeked young gentleman, in the past year. Despite that one notable repetition, he and Keaton still provide a good batch of fresh, funny new material to fill out the rest of the show. It's quite scattered and the story is secondary at best, but the physical humor lands with consistency and that's really why we're here, right?

There is a pretty good variety of material in this short feature, with a lot of Arbuckle-style humor and also a more fanciful sequence of the kind that Keaton later refined and used in a lot of his own comedies. Here, the material is mostly unrefined, but it has some very good moments.

The opening sequence on the street corner starts to drag a little after a while, but things pick up when Arbuckle's wife sends him to a private sanitarium, where he meets up with Keaton and Alice Lake, resulting in some weird adventures. Keaton has some very funny moments in taking advantage of Arbuckle's confusion, and the dream sequence is quite imaginative.

Most Arbuckle/Keaton fans should find more than enough here to make "Good Night, Nurse!" enjoyable. Though much of it is a little unpolished, it has plenty of humor and energy.

Despite some moments in heavy rain, an encounter with a drunk as well as an organ grinder with a gypsy and a monkey, and a stay in a sanitarium, this Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle silent comedy short with support from Buster Keaton and Al St. John is only fitfully amusing though there is a quite funny sequence of Arbuckle in drag flirting with Buster that's the ultimate in "meet cute" scenes especially since it's one of the few times we see The Great Stone Face smile and laugh in the movies! Also, many scenes seem to have been jump cut edited possibly because of overuse of the film stock. Still, if you're an Arbuckle or Keaton completist, Good Night, Nurse! is certainly worth a look.

The sequence in the rain that opens this short is fantastic, maybe one of the best comedic portrayals of being drunk. There are so many funny bits here, including Arbuckle repeatedly trying to light a cigarette in the downpour, a woman with an umbrella (Buster Keaton!) being blown into him and then down the street horizontally by the gale, and Arbuckle trying to mail a fellow drunk (Snitz Edwards) home after writing his address on his shirt and stamping his forehead. Check out the high kick to the face Keaton gives him, one of two in the film (the other is delivered by Joe Keaton, Buster's father).

His wife (Alice Lake) has seen an advertisement that claims alcoholism can be cured by an operation at the "No Hope" Sanitarium (never mind that right below it is an article claiming sensationally "Seasickness Cured!"). At the entrance to the place, they meet a heavily bandaged man walking out on crutches (Joe Keaton) saying he is fully cured which gives Arbuckle pause, and allows for a little effect work when he throws the man his crutches and he catches them in perfect walking pose, done with reverse motion. When they get inside, we meet the doctor (Buster Keaton) who has blood all over his surgical gown, sharpening a giant knife as if he were going to carve up a holiday roast. We get a further glimpse of the wickedness of Arbuckle's humor when a "crazy" woman (also Alice Lake) runs into the room and throws herself into his arms. With his wife looking on, he realizes he can take advantage of the situation and after looking at the viewer, gives her a couple of kisses.

Much of the second half consists of trying to physically subdue Arbuckle to have the operation, or capture him when he tries to escape. Some of that is typical slapstick fare, like a pillow fight that results in a million feathers in the air, but there are lots of other enjoyable bits, starting with the camera gradually going out of focus when Arbuckle is sedated. At one point he disguises himself as a female nurse and then flirts awkwardly with Dr. Keaton, both men putting a finger in their mouth and bashfully looking away, Buster grinning sheepishly, a hilarious moment. Arbuckle shows once again that he was light on his feet, a result of having had dance lessons. Just watch him gracefully leap sideways into a pool to distance himself from the woman who during the escape now wants to go back, just as he pranced around so well in his living room early on. He finds himself in a race of the "200-Pound club" which amusingly has the other contestants keel over by the side of the road, and him dashing to victory.

It's certainly not politically correct today and interesting to note it wasn't politically correct in its day either, something that would eventually come back to unfairly haunt Arbuckle when he was put on trial in the Virginia Rappe case. Enjoy him here with his pal Buster, possibly at the height of his career.