La casa tempestosa

In cinema's infancy, most of the comedy involved gags. That's very much apparent in "The Rough House", starring and jointly directed by Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton. The plot involves a get-together beset by one mishap after another (i.e., when Arbuckle's character accidentally starts a fire).

Keaton was only getting started in cinema, so Arbuckle is the star here. His physique certainly abets the comedy. I understand that not many of his movies survive due to his career having suffered after the death of an actress at a party that he was hosting. It's too bad, because he obviously had a lot of talent. Basically, this is the sort of movie that you can enjoy if you're willing to accept a bunch of silly stuff.

This is a pretty poor film in some ways. First, although Buster Keaton is in the film, he is not given much to do. Instead, Fatty Arbuckle is clearly the star and Keaton and Al St. John are just along for the ride.

The film has a few cute moments, such as the incredibly slow and lazy way that Fatty responds to a fire he accidentally started in the house. But, unfortunately, too much of the film is mindless slapstick--punching, kicking and falling for little apparent reason. While this was very popular in the early days of film, by 1917, this was fortunately becoming passé. Not that the violence and action was bad, but that films in the early days had almost no plot--just action and hitting. This film unfortunately didn't find the right balance--just way too much mindless pratfalls.

Haven't seen much of Arbuckle since I was a kid and, on the evidence of this effort, I haven't really missed much. I can't help wondering how famous Arbuckle's name would be today had his career not been destroyed by the Virginia Rappe affair. Probably as famous as Larry Semon, who was also big in the silent era but is now all but forgotten - and with good reason.

Arbuckle is outshone in every scene by his sidekick, Buster Keaton. This was only Keaton's second film but his technique is already far in advance of Fatty's. The story is non-existent, merely a prop on which to hang the relentless stream of pratfalls and sight gags. That's OK if the gags are funny and their execution spot on, but only Keaton is getting it right, so the laughs are few and far between. As others have pointed out already, its Fatty's lackadaisical attempts to put out a fire and his sausage-on-a-fork dance, which pre-empts Charlie the tramp's more famous version by a good seven years, that rise above the mediocre.

Rough House, The (1917)

*** (out of 4)

Fatty Arbuckle helps run a seaside resort but trouble starts when a deliver boy (Buster Keaton) shows up. It's rather amazing to see how much time the star/director Fatty gave to Keaton who's allowed to steal the show with his physical comedy. Another interesting thing is that there's a dinner scene where Fatty puts forks in two rolls and does a dance, which Chaplin borrowed eight years later in The Gold Rush.

Butcher Boy, The (1917)

** (out of 4)

The butcher boy (Fatty Arbuckle) falls for the store owner's daughter and must fight to get her. The first half of the film takes place in the store and has Buster Keaton playing an obnoxious customer. This half is very funny but the second half dealing with Fatty dressing in drag in order to sneak into a boarding school really doesn't work.

The Rough House, a Roscoe Arbuckle short featuring Buster Keaton in a supporting role in just his second film, isn't exactly sophisticated when it comes to humor. A lot of the comedy consists of people falling down or being knocked down. By my count, Buster alone hit the deck 11 times in his first 3 and a half minutes on the screen, over 3 times a minute. There are a few exceptions though, like Arbuckle using forks stuck into bread rolls to emulate a simple little dance, something Charlie Chaplin surely saw and improved on in The Gold Rush eight years later. That's at the 3:41 point and probably this film's best moment, but it's brief. Arbuckle also cleverly uses a fan as a potato slicer in the kitchen and a sponge to squeeze soup into the bowls of diners as a waiter, and I wish there had more riffs on this sort of thing. The film also seems choppy in a few places, usually around moments when women are falling, being groped, or kissed, suggesting to me that the surviving print may have been a victim to a local censorship board. Regardless, it's not very remarkable, and maybe only worth checking out for the dinner roll bit.