Good Night Nurse

Fatty Arbuckle plays a wealthy lush whose wife ships him off to the asylum for a quick fix to alcoholism; Buster Keaton plays the blood-soaked doctor who steps straight out of the operating room to greet him. There's a lot of dark subject matter at play here, an odd concept for high-tempo slapstick comedy, but that's all quickly shuffled to the side in favor of a reckless pillow fight and another bout of cross-dressing. This must be the fourth time Fatty has donned a woman's wig and dress, flirting with a red-cheeked young gentleman, in the past year. Despite that one notable repetition, he and Keaton still provide a good batch of fresh, funny new material to fill out the rest of the show. It's quite scattered and the story is secondary at best, but the physical humor lands with consistency and that's really why we're here, right?

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.

There's an old phrase, "Good Night Nurse," so popular in the 1920's. The expression meant a disastrous or a surprise ending. It originated from Roscoe Arbuckle's July 1918 "Good Night, Nurse!" During one scene, Fatty disguises himself as a nurse trying to escape a sanitarium his wife had committed him to for his excessive drinking. When he's confronted by the hospital's head doctor, played by Buster Keaton, he begins to flirt like a fourth grader with him in the hallway. Keaton returns the shy mannerisms, creating a classic scene that is still talked about today.

One of the reasons Arbuckle was so impressed with Keaton is the synergy both created when they spent hours bouncing ideas off one another and expounded those jokes into a coherent, yet memorable progression of visual compositions on film. Keaton returned a year later after being honorably discharged from the Army, and appeared in a trio of films with Arbuckle before he was rewarded with his own film production unit under movie executive Joseph Schenck.

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.

This is a typical Fatty Arbuckle vehicle, full of fast-paced slapstick. Much of the material is, typically for early silent comedy, rather unchoreographed mayhem: for example, 5 hospital staff members trying to move Arbuckle from a bed to a gurney, all 12 arms and legs jumping, flailing and falling. The faster everything moves, the better! However, there are several quite interesting moments in the film.

Firstly, at one point, Arbuckle, dressed as a nurse, flirts with Dr. Buster Keaton in a lengthy (over a minute) sequence; standing on opposite sides of a hallway, they make goo-goo eyes at each other, shyly fingering their own lips with their index fingers, and tracing sweet nothings in extreme embarrassment upon the walls near which they stand, respectively. It is interesting to see Keaton play a man smitten; his famous stone-face character of later solo films famously saw women only as necessary nuisances. More shockingly, at the end of the flirting scene, as Keaton and Arbuckle playfully push each other around, Keaton actually laughs - something we will never see him do on his own.

The funniest part of the movie is when the nearby town holds its annual "Fat Man Race". Within a minute, all the runners have fallen to the side of the road, exhausted - very funny. As can be expected, Arbuckle will accidentally fall into the race. At one point, a man paints the number "5" on a telephone pole. As expected, Arbuckle leans against the pole, and when he moves away, we see the number 5 on his back; now he really seems to be a part of the race. Bizarrely, the "5" does not appear on his back in reverse, as it should; the imprint from the pole has miraculously reversed itself!

Lastly, it may be noted that silent comedy had a penchant for sight gags that revolved around physical deformity and grotesqueness. At one point in this film, Arbuckle hands the end of a long hose to a local hick. The hick grins, showing off a vile looking orifice, filled with gum disease, but few teeth. Repulsive and pointless! Long live silent film comedy.