I've just had to revise my opinion of this movie. Previously I had thought it chaotically performed and edited. However, I have just come from the Museum of Modern Art where they have shown a print of this as part of a twelve-program series of Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle movies. It was the most complete print I've seen of this movie and it takes its place along with the other classic late-Keystone Arbuckles like THE WAITER'S BALL and HE DID AND HE DIDN'T. The ending is still abrupt. There's a shot of Washington Square Arch that makes me believe it was shot as a three-reeler, but that's all that survives of the third reel. Perhaps, though the missing footage will turn up.
Structurally it's an episodic series of one-reelers, something that Chaplin was still using twenty years later in MODERN TIMES: in the first, Roscoe gets a job as a janitor in a skyscraper and performs a series of gags on that theme. In the second, he is mistaken by the wife of the building's manager for a Missouri businessman she has been asked to entertain. "Are you Stout?" she asks, since that is the man's name. Roscoe, of course, misunderstands her....
On the way out of the museum, however, I was annoyed to hear one of the people who had been to the show announce "But it's still the same old pratfalls." True enough. And FINNEGANS WAKE is still the same old alphabet. There hasn't been a new letter added since the 17th century. You will pardon me, I hope, for thinking that someone who can't differentiate between a capital C and a small o is not likely to utter intelligent criticism of English literature. I submit that someone who cannot tell the difference between a neck roll and a 108 probably can't make an informed statement about silent comedy.
Well, I can tell the difference, and I think Arbuckle made some damned fine comedies and this is one of them. If you manage to see a good print, I think you might agree.
