Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition

Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition (1915)

** (out of 4)

Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle and Mabel Normand visit the San Diego Exposition just as the title says. Once there she decides to take a look around without him and sure enough Fatty the husband starts chasing another woman not knowing that she has a very jealous husband. This Keystone comedy doesn't contain a single laugh but while watching it I could just imagine people back in 1915 really eating it up because two of their favorite stars were out on location at a place that most people would have known about. Throughout the picture it really does seem that many of the extras are actual people at the event because if you watch them they're constantly looking at the stars, smiling and watching everything they're doing. It really does seem that they're interested in how the movie is being made and they eating up every second of it. Sadly, there really aren't too many laughs here. There are some physical moments where Fatty falls and gets slapped around but none of this got me to laugh. It's cleat that he and Normand have some nice chemistry but this here isn't one of their better films.

Roscoe Arbuckle and Mabel Normand are a married couple at the San Diego Exposition. That opened in January of 1915 and ran for a couple of years. They keep trying to cross the street during a parade. They rent a motorized wheelchair for two. While Mabel goes into a store, Roscoe hits on Minta Durfee and goes to see the Royal Hawaiian Dancers dance the hula. Hubba hubba.

Did they say "Hubba hubba" in 1915? Probably not. This looks like one of the Keystones made in the early, heady days of 1913-1914, when Mack Sennett would send a crew down to some event and ave them improvise against it, then edit the results. Chaplin's first movie, KID AUTO RACES AT VENICE, was made that way, and while Arbuckle liked to offer more elaborately plotted and carefully shot movies, he and Mabel were quite caable of making it up as they went along.

That's John (or Jack) Coogan Sr. standing behind Mabel near the beginning, and I think that was Billy West, who started out imitating Charley Chaplin's "Tramp" character, appearing near the end. I consider this short to be just a little better than most of the early Keystone efforts, which were often "let's take a camera out someplace and film funny things," and frequently ended up being pretty awful. I did enjoy the hula "girls" getting into the spirit. I wish they had shown more of the exposition, because my grandfather who had been a Cavalry troop commander, was assigned to the Department of California at that time, and told his children that his unit had been filmed more than once.

The light slapstick and the contemporary footage of the San Diego Exposition make this watchable, but it is most interesting for its improvisational approach and for its unusual blend of fantasy and reality. Although numerous other Roscoe Arbuckle/Mabel Normand features are more enjoyable in themselves, this one is unique in its way.

Mack Sennett sent his two stars to San Diego, and placed them in a semi-staged, semi-spontaneous situation in the midst of the crowds and attractions of the exposition, as much to promote the exposition as to create comedy. Arbuckle, Normand, Minta Durfee, and a handful of other Keystone performers see some of the sights and then get involved in some slapstick predicaments.

In the opening scenes, Arbuckle and Normand are more or less simply appearing as themselves. Gradually a story of sorts begins, with Arbuckle playing the role of a shameless flirt, and Mabel the jealous woman who decides to teach him a lesson. It plays out against the background of the crowd that was there that day, and it has the stars interact with some of the exhibits and performances at the exhibition, with one of the longer sequences taking place at a hula dance performance.

Arbuckle's unsympathetic role limits what he can do; he does his job effectively, but aside from a couple of displays of his agility he never gets the chance to do very much. This isn't Normand's best role either, but she gets to do more, and as usual her gestures and facial expressions work very well as slightly exaggerated comic outrage. Some of the slapstick works well, although at other times the largely unplanned format keeps it from jelling.

The most interesting thing about the movie is that there is never a clear-cut transition from the actors playing themselves to them playing their characters. Likewise, it's not always easy to determine how much the crowd expected, and how much records their honest reactions to the actors. Sennett, of course, hardly meant this as a philosophical statement, but it is still a very interesting example of the kinds of themes involving fantasy, reality, identity, and art that for the most part were not taken up by film-makers until much later.