The Butcher Boy

This Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle comedy is best remembered for featuring a young Buster Keaton, fresh from splitting with his family's roughhouse Vaudeville act, in his film debut. Buster gets quite a substantial part in this film and it's quite a funny one overall. "The Butcher Boy" has lots of laughs and is an example of pure old-fashioned slapstick done well, though it would seem to come from the brief era of two-reel comedies when filmmakers still imagined in one-reel segments as a matter of course.

The first half of the film takes place in a general store, with Arbuckle as the the butcher boy of the title. It's an excuse to mine the many possibilities for fast physical humor that a general store provides, and Arbuckle really shows himself to be a 300-pound acrobat, demonstrating subtlety, skill, and grace in his performance of what might have been unremarkable slapstick routines that raise them to a different level. A running gag has him flipping a large butcher knife casually so that it spins accurately into it's proper position stuck into the cutting board, and I'm still stunned that Arbuckle really seems to do it each time. There's also a really nice gag that sees him leaning on his scale and confused as to why his cuts of meat weigh so much.

Buster Keaton is a boy who comes into to buy some molasses, and performs deftly in a foot-stuck-to-floor routine that follows. Apart from the odd and almost unsettling half-smile, his idiosyncratic attitude and body language make him recognizable immediately as the Buster we know. He even has his eventually-trademarked flattened hat -- here destroyed for the first time when filled, of course, with molasses.

The second half of the film moves into more situation-based comedy and Arbuckle and his rival Al St. John dress in drag to infiltrate Fatty's girlfriend's boarding school. A lot of the humor also comes from the generally surreal and mysteriously laugh-inducing sight of these two odd fellows wearing drag and trying to "be girls." buster is in this segment too, but mostly stands there in the occasional cutaway, helping St. John.

The ending of "The Butcher Boy" becomes a little emptily frenetic, but on the whole and beyond its historical curiosity interest, it's a well-done comedy that gets just the knockabout laughs it is going for.

While everyone knows that this is Buster Keaton's debut into movies and a taste of genius to come, I find the most incredible fact is that at the start of the day this movie was filmed Buster had no plans to go into movies, he was, in fact, about to start work in a New York theatrical show. He was invited to work on the film by Fatty and basically improvised his very first scene with the props to hand, in this case a barrel of brushes, he had never been in front of a movie camera before and in those days there was very little rehearsal, proof of his natural ability for the moving picture medium.

This is a typical Arbuckle slapstick, very frenetic, but, lots of fun, but, it is mainly a curiousity as it was Keaton's debut. An interesting thing to do is watch all Keaton/Arbuckle movies in the order they were made and see Keaton's increasing influence on them, a real taste of things to come when Keaton was making his own movies.

By the way, as usual Luke the dog comes very close to stealing all the scenes he's in.

The details of how Buster Keaton first met Roscoe Arbuckle are murky, but when they did, the initial encounter introduced to the screen one of cinema's greatest silent movie comics.

Keaton is included in the top handful of comedic actors during that era who's acting continues to have an enormous impact in today's films. His trademark calm demeanor in the midst of utter chaos on the screen stood in stark contrast to the helter skelter world of the popular Keystone comedians, of which Arbuckle was one of them. Yet Keaton's cool film personality not only endured, but created a new kind of comedy acting imitated in future generations of movie humorists.

Keaton's first appearance in film is seen in April 1917's "The Butcher Boy," with "Fatty" Arbuckle starring and directing the two-reeler. He shows up part-way into the movie, examining brooms in their holder at the shop. Keaton does some nifty handling of these sweepers in this debuting sequence. Later on, his struggle with molasses, a cinematic classic, with Fatty literally cements the pair's on-screen association. Altogether, the two actors appeared in 14 movies, proving the first meeting was especially pivotal to the 21-year-old Keaton.

Buster, contracted to play in in the Broadway revue "The Passing Show," met on a New York City street either a mutual friend of Arbuckle's or a professional associate of Paramount Pictures. Either way, the person invited the vaudeville star to stop by the local film studio where Fatty was rehearsing for his next movie, "The Butcher Shop." He did, and Fatty, knowing of Keaton, invited him to play a small role in his movie. Buster had some free time and dived in, and like lightening, the two comedians clicked. An anecdotal tale has Keaton so intrigued by what he had just witnessed in the studio he asked to borrow a camera for the night. He proceeded to take apart and put together again in his hotel room the camera to understand its inner mechanisms.

This Fatty Arbuckle short feature is a historical treasure in that it was the first film appearance of the great Buster Keaton, and it has some decent slapstick too. The first half takes place in the general store where 'Fatty' is working as the "Butcher Boy", and it has some good moments, with a couple of clever gadgets, although no big laughs. The last half is the best part, with Fatty, Buster, Fatty's frequent foil Al St. John, and their dog all converging on a boarding school, in a manic sequence that includes some good material. It's unrefined, old-fashioned slapstick, but good fun for anyone who enjoys Arbuckle and/or Keaton.

This film certainly wasn't very sophisticated. No, the humor was in fact pretty dumb now that I think about it. But, also while I think of it, I did laugh--proving decent comedy doesn't need to be very deep.

Fatty Arbuckle is the definite star of this short, despite Buster Keaton's appearing in the film as well. He is the butcher in an old-time grocery store. A lot of silly stuff occurred in the store and I think I laughed the most at the coffee grinder sequence--you'll just have to see it yourself.

Anyway, later, Fatty's girlfriend is forced to go to a girls' school and because he can't stand to part, he dresses in drag and infiltrates the school. Arbuckle is one ugly woman! So, for silly and unsophisticated fun, see this film. It won't change your life and is a very slight picture, but it's also fun.