You're the One for Me Fatty
If Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle had never existed, would Hollywood have invented someone just like him? Perhaps so: Arbuckle, whose career is being celebrated with an appropriately massive, 50-film Museum of Modern Art retrospective April 20-May 15, was one of the most notorious exemplars of the fat man as funny monster.
Arbuckle won fame and riches as an improbable comic lead in silent movies, and as his star rose, he got some fleeting chances to prove (and improve) his gifts.
Today, of course, he's known not for his work, but for being one of the first objects of Hollywood scandal, charged with raping and accidentally killing Virginia Rappe, a 25-year-old silent film starlet, in 1921. The actual details of what happened are still clouded but, according to newspapers and Hollywood gossip rags-which had previously depicted Arbuckle as a freaky but lovable oaf-Arbuckle crushed Rappe beneath his 266-pound body and ripped her insides apart with either a Coke bottle, a wine bottle or a shard of ice.
Arbuckle was tried three times and was acquitted after the third, but he was blacklisted by Hollywood. Audiences were no more able to laugh at him than they were able to laugh at O.J. Simpson's Naked Gun cameos post-1995. When he died in 1933 his name was a synonym for Hollywood sordidness. There's an undercurrent of inevitability to his rise and fall: Few fat performers are allowed to be lovable for long since the public is always on the lookout for hints of evil beneath the jolly facade.
Sad to say, but time hasn't been kind to Arbuckle the artist. After all these decades, he's still an unnerving novelty act, increasingly notable mainly for his status as a bloody footnote in movie history.
As a film archivist in college, I first encountered his work before learning the nasty details of the scandal. Being temperamentally inclined to root for the maligned, I wanted to love his films, but compared to Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon and even day players like Edgar Kennedy, he always struck me as too oafish and untutored.
The first movie I saw him in was "The Knock-Out," from 1914 (not shown by MoMA), in which he played a man who signs up as a boxer to impress his girlfriend. I was struck by the fact that while Arbuckle was admittedly funny bumbling around and getting pounded, the audience laughed harder at Charlie Chaplin, who had a cameo as the puny yet game referee. The audience was right. Chaplin and Arbuckle were friends and rivals throughout their career-Chaplin even borrowed Arbuckle's gigantic pants for his Little Tramp outfit-but even a person who knew nothing about silent comedy would be able to see that the little man was 10 times the performer the big man was. Chaplin's movements were precise yet supple, as if every muscle in his body was controlled by a dedicated part of the brain. Arbuckle, in contrast, often seemed to be just lumbering through, earning giggles and guffaws tinged with anxiety over what he was capable of-a Pagliacci who might explode at any moment.
Yet he found range in his imprecision. In Charlie Chaplin's "The Rounders" (shown as part of the "Early Keystones" program, April 20 at 8 p.m. and May 3 at 6 p.m.), Chaplin and Arbuckle play sad-sack neighbors in a rooming house, one of whom beats his wife and the other of whom is beaten; thrown out by their respective partners, their drunken adventures lead them to a bar, where they're evicted for trying to use tables as beds, and then to a lake, where their leaky rowboat sinks and they're spared the indignity of going home.
Here, as in so many Arbuckle roles, the actor taps desperation without italicizing pathos (Chaplin's specialty). His creature-of-appetites charisma worked against sentimentality. His game-but-klutzy energy made him seem not a silent film clown stylizing human behavior, but a real man.
Arbuckle never made more sense as an actor than when he was paired with Mabel Normand, a wide-eyed doll whose sunny presence bestowed dignity on him in a string of shorts, including "Mabel," "Fatty and the Law," "Mabel and Fatty's Wash Day," and "Mable and Fatty Viewing the World's Fair at San Francisco" (all to be screened by MoMA). It's also an Arbuckle/Normand duo that gives silent film its first pie-in-the-face scene (1913's "A Noise from the Deep"). One of their best pairings is "That Little Band of Gold" (Friday, April 20, 8 p.m.; Sunday, May 7, 1 p.m.) in which they play newlyweds whose union is endangered by the husband's inability to quit carousing with his buddies. Some of their shorts play like silent dry runs for "The Honeymooners"-and not just because of Arbuckle's girth; both Gleason and Arbuckle found ways to laugh at life's unremitting harshness.
Still, the stench of horror lingers over every chuckle. One wishes it were possible to judge Arbuckle's gifts without knowledge of the charges against him, but it's just not possible. The laughs catch in your throat.