Article on Roscoe Arbuckle from the NY Times
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Roscoe Arbuckle
wmorrow59 — 19 years ago(April 19, 2006 07:22 PM)
Tomorrow evening, the Museum of Modern Art in NYC will launch a film festival devoted to the career of Roscoe Arbuckle. The following article appeared in the New York Times this past Sunday:
Restoring Fatty Arbuckle's Tarnished Reputation at MoMA
By DAVE KEHR
When Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle checked into the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco for a Labor Day weekend of rest and recreation in September 1921, he was one of the most celebrated and beloved comedians in America. One week later, he was a pariah. On Sept. 11, Arbuckle was arrested for the rape and murder of Virginia Rapp, a 28-year-old actress who passed out during a party in Arbuckle's suite and died a few days later of peritonitis. It mattered little that Arbuckle was subsequently cleared of all charges. That did not stop Will Hays, the first president of the organization that later became the Motion Picture Association of America, from issuing a ban on Arbuckle's films.
Although the ban was eventually lifted, the black mark against Arbuckle's name remained. Unable to work under his own name, he spent the balance of the 1920's directing shorts (and a pair of important features) for other comedians. Not until the early 30's did he appear on screen again, in a series of short films for Warner Brothers. The shorts were successful, and Arbuckle was celebrating the signing of a new contract when he died of heart failure in New York City on June 29, 1933. He was 46 years old.
Someday it may be possible to write an article about Roscoe Arbuckle without mentioning the scandal that destroyed his career. If that day comes, it will be because of the work of Arbuckle buffs like William Hunt and Paul E. Gierucki, who put together the indispensable four-DVD collection "The Forgotten Films of Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle" (www.mackinacmedia.com), and to Ron Magliozzi, Steve Massa and Ben Model, who programmed the monthlong series "Rediscovering Roscoe: The Careers of (Fatty) Arbuckle," which begins Thursday at the Museum of Modern Art.
Before sound, when movie actors had to state their personalities through a unique physical presence, Arbuckle looked like a sketch out of the Sunday funnies: the large, almost perfectly round head, bisected by a wide mouth that could leer or grinb68 or lustily devour, perched atop an almost equally round body, the spherical qualities of the ensemble accentuated by a bowler hat. He was a large man, but not markedly obese. For all his bulk he was fast and graceful of movement, and many of the jokes in the early Keystone films he started at Mack Sennett's pioneering comedy studio in 1913, after a career in vaudeville depend on Arbuckle's surprising agility, as he ducks and dives and dashes to avoid the grasp of a pursuing policeman or the wrath of a jealous wife.
As seen on film, Arbuckle's build is that of both an overgrown infant and an adult sensualist, and he often shifts between the two connotations of his appearance for rich comic effect. He may approach a woman as an awkward, ungainly child, only to shoot a sudden look at the audience that bespeaks a happy, uninhibited lechery an ambiguity that probably contributed to his image problems when his trial came up. He is also, like Chaplin and several other comedians of his age, an enthusiastic cross-dresser; with his corpulence poured into one of the tentlike bathing suits of the period, he could pass for a curvaceous Victorian woman of the sort only then going out of style. So convincing was Arbuckle as a woman that he made several shorts "Miss Fatty's Seaside Lovers" is one, playing on Friday's program in which he plays a female character, with no drag alibi involved.
A leering country bumpkin with barnyard manners and a libido to match in the early films, Arbuckle's character grew in complexity once he escaped the direct influence of Sennett, moving his unit in 1915 from California to Fort Lee, N.J., where he could make his own films with little interference. Films like "That Little Band of Gold" (1915) and "He Did and He Didn't" (1916) find Arbuckle moving away from Sennett's frenetic slapstick into a sophisticated comedy of sexual temptation and spousal envy. In the remarkable "He Did and He Didn't" (also playing on Friday), Arbuckle is a respected professional, a doctor who looks quite handsome in his tuxedo as he tries to cope with a flirtation between his wife (Mabel Normand, his frequent screen partner) and one of her old flames. The surreal climax, worthy of Philip K. Dick, reveals that the two rivals turn out to be sharing the same dream.
Arbuckle's richest period came after he left Sennett for the producer Joseph Schenck, who set him up with his own company, Comique. "The Butcher Boy," the first film under the new contract, introduced a new supporting player, Buster Keaton an old acquaintance of Arbuckle's from the vaudeville circuit. The Keaton of the Comique shorts (there are two full programs of them at MoMA, on Saturday at 6 and 8 p.m.) is not the Great Stone Face o -
Pamfino — 19 years ago(April 20, 2006 06:07 AM)
Thank you so much, wmorrow59, for posting that wonderful article! It's a pleasure to read such a warm, affectionate tribute to our much-maligned Roscoe. I just wish I was in New York to be able to see the MoMA season!
Pam
"I am not young enough to know everything." : Oscar Wilde