Le Garage de Fatty

That kind of collaboration giving a gem, because the clash between two different characters and two meanings of a garage are well used for fun, for inspired gags and as frame of a special form of nostalgia. A lovely short film reminding the genius of two great commedians.

Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle team up for the last time for "The Garage", in which they play mechanics for whom everything goes wrong. It's clear that these two made a great comedy team. I'd go so far as to say that they were the Laurel and Hardy of their day. Probably would've continued had Arbuckle not gotten mired in a scandal.

As for the antics, there's a bathtub, a pole, and grease. I try to imagine how much fun everyone must've had filming it. I don't know if it's widely available (I saw it on YouTube).

Fun stuff.

The Garage marked the end of an era, as it was the final short Roscoe Arbuckle and Buster Keaton would make together. The 1920's would see Keaton's solo career skyrocket into immortality, and to Arbuckle's credit, he fully supported Keaton going his own way. Meanwhile, Arbuckle's career would of course be brutally derailed by the injustice of the Virginia Rappe case less than two years later, the public fanned into a frenzy by the tabloid journalism of William Randolph Hearst and willing to believe the worst about a star whose screen persona always had a dark streak. Knowing the impending parting of ways and fates of these friends makes watching this short special.

There are lots of amusing bits here, including getting several gags out of an automobile turntable (Buster running on it like a gerbil among other things), Arbuckle walking behind Buster and hoisting him up so Buster can swipe a pair of pants and instantly put them on, and Buster getting stuck in the fence and having a dog (good old Luke) attack his backside. The garage mechanics are also firemen (of course!), and the contraption they rigged up to whisk the covers off their beds as well as their nightshirts in response to a fire alarm was hilarious, my favorite. As James Curtis writes in his biography of Keaton, Buster believed this was the best of his films with Arbuckle ("It was a honey," he said, "It was a pip."). While I don't fully agree with him, it's certainly entertaining.

Keaton and Arbuckle have come a long way since "The Butcher." It's wonderful to see how well they work together in this one.

Leave it to Buster to go *up* the firehouse pole routinely!

There is indeed a lot of "The Blacksmith" (1922) in this one; maybe that, as well as "Cops" (1922), were both Keaton's homage to Arbuckle during his legal trials (which began in late 1921).

Also, now I finally understand the bathtub scene with Sybil Seely in "One Week," which came out in September 1920 ("The Garage" came out at the beginning of that year). The cheesecake seemed out of place in "One Week," but I see now that Keaton was duplicating the scene with Molly Malone here in "The Garage." He did it so well, I had to look both shorts up to make sure different actresses played them.

"One Week" was the first short that Keaton made on his own, and perhaps that explains why "The Garage" is the last Keaton-Arbuckle collaboration.

Also, I used to think Seeley was the most athletic of the Keaton female co-stars, but Malone is even better here.

The scene with Buster running on that spinning disc is also done, in a very different setting, in "The Haunted House," a Keaton short that came out a little over a year after "The Garage."

Keaton and Arbuckle's final collaboration is also their finest. With Fatty soon moving on to feature-lengths and Buster continuing as a solo act, the prolific duo came together one last time to entertain audiences (and themselves) in a typically short, simple silent comedy.

They're a pair of mechanics this time, serving double-duty in a combination garage / firehouse, and incapable of finishing one job without creating two or three new ones. The various props and occasions of a busy day in the auto repair business provide ample opportunity for clever laughs, which Arbuckle and Keaton casually pluck like fresh fruit from an overburdened apple tree. It's jam-packed with smart, funny, groundbreaking material; twenty-odd minutes of nonstop escalation. A posh suitor, interested in dating the boss's daughter, sees his neat white suit (and thoughtful flower bouquet) summarily ruined by the bumbling duo, who happen to be working with motor oil nearby. Wobbly vehicles are rented out with no chance of leaving the yard. An enormous turntable, once used to wash and inspect cars, becomes a high-speed human dry-cleaning station and, soon enough, a treadmill.

There's so much rich, creative energy jammed into this small package, it's hard to believe the masterminds behind it were about to split apart. In time, that divorce would work to Keaton's benefit. Arbuckle, sadly, wasn't quite so fortunate.