Good Night Nurse

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.

Roscoe Arbuckle stars as a man with alcohol addiction. His wife commits him to No Hope Sanitarium where they are greeted by the doctor wearing blood covered gown (Buster Keaton) and crazy female patient (Alice Lake). The film is quite loose on plot (like Arbuckle's movies usually), but this one is one of the most incoherent ones. That doesn't mean it is not funny or enjoyable. 'Good Night, Nurse!' is not so much of slapstick stuff, but it works rather as dark comedy. Still, one over the top sequence follows the other, until all the adventures get little bit unsatisfactory conclusion.

One interesting scene is where Arbuckle dresses up as female nurse and then starts to flirt with Buster Keaton's doctor. Scenes, where Buster smiles so long, are really rare. There are brief glimpses of his smile in some other movies, but in this movie, we don't see one bit of Keaton's usual stone face - he is thoughtful or smiling throughout the film.

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.

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.

Exiled to the No Hope Sanatorium by his wife after drunkenly returning home with an organ grinder and his monkey, Roscoe comes face-to-face with Doctor Buster Keaton sharpening knives in his blood-smeared smock. This surreal humour infiltrates much of Good Night, Nurse, but while it provides a welcome relief from the more generic style of slapstick humour with which the big man is associated, the laughs are hard to find until the climactic foot race.