The NFR Project #46: 'Fatty's Tintype Tangle'

Fatty gets a dressing-down in 'Fatty's Tintype Tangle.'

Fatty’s Tintype Tangle

Dir: Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle

Prod: Mack Sennett (uncred.)

Scr: Unknown

Phot: Unknown

Premiere: July 14, 1915

27:38

Roscoe Arbuckle weighed 13 pounds at birth, destroying his mother’s health and contributing to her premature death 12 years later. His father suspected that he was the son of another man. Lesser things have driven people into a need for the plaudits of show business.

He had a divine singing voice, but his comic talents brought him to the fore. Like many large comic performers (Oliver Hardy, Jackie Gleason), he was light on his feet and capable of unexpected acrobatics. He became a wow in the field of vaudeville on the West Coast, and jumped into moving pictures at just the right time.

D.W. Griffith shot the first feature-film footage in Los Angeles in 1910. The forgiving climate, the laid-back atmosphere, and the distance from the litigious Thomas Edison, who didn’t want anyone infringing on his film patents, made it a natural destination for budding and/or independent film production companies. Twenty-five percent of the industry moved West immediately.

Mack Sennett was part of that movement. At 32 years of age, he built Keystone Studio and began literally cranking out slapstick comedies. By the following year, he had three hot properties: comedienne Mabel Normand, the Keystone Cops, and Fatty Arbuckle. For the next eight years, Arbuckle was in the leading rank of movie clowns. He mentored Charlie Chaplin; he discovered Buster Keaton and Bob Hope.

“Fatty’s Tintype Tangle” is typical of Arbuckle’s work. Here he plays a henpecked husband who literally waits like Cinderella on his wife and nagging stepmother. The idea of a fat man being effeminate is reinforced by his somewhat inept execution of kitchen duties (though he is graceful with a spatula and a pancake), and the sarcastic curtsey he executes when summoned. He is a “gentle man,” meaning gentled, pacified. He is more of a grown-up adolescent, what used to be referred to as a scamp. It’s an appealing comic persona, an epicene Everyman.

Forced to give his mother-in-law a good-morning peck on the cheek, he crams spoonsful of sugar into his mouth. After taking a few hits off the jug in the kitchen, he becomes rebellious and aggressive, which backfires on him. On one disturbing level he’s a baby-man; a toddler who messes his clothes, hands, and face with food, drink, and other substances. Fatty makes a mess, breaking dishes in a tantrum and eventually eating a plate, eventually and clumsily asserting his manhood and leaving.

The plot is convoluted and farcical. Fatty accidentally has a compromising photo taken of himself and a strange woman in the park. (The photo is the tintype of the title – a positive print made on an emulsion-coated, thin sheet of metal, which could be developed in minutes, making it the “instant” photography of its day. It was used primarily by itinerant photographers at carnivals and fairs, and was already an anachronism at the time this film was made.)

The woman’s husband threatens him, and Fatty tries to leave town. The woman and her husband, portrayed as uncouth rues from Alaska (?), are looking for lodgings, and Fatty’s wife rents out their rooms to them. Fatty returns home, all parties, converge, and complications ensue.

Many of the standard gags are here – Fatty slips on a banana peel, a first for this survey. A man is knocked onto a moving streetcar via reverse on-screen motion. There is comic jousting and gunplay. The Keystone Cops are cut into the film, but they never actually interact with nay of the principals, so it’s likely unrelated footage of them that was thrown in out of context, as a crowd-pleaser. The highlight is some wire work – in evading the jealous husband, Fatty does some acrobatics on elastic bands made to look like telephone wires two stories above the ground in what looks like unfaked footage. After a double fall into a rain barrel as an excuse to do some underwater gagging, the two men are hauled out by their respective wives and the film comes to a harmonious if abrupt end.

The jealous husband is played by none other than the up-and-coming comic actor Edgar Kennedy. A former boxer (he went 14 rounds with Dempsey), he joined Keystone as one of the original Cops, growing into a supporting player known as “The King of the Slow Burn.” Here Kennedy is functional, displaying a flash of his superior mugging when he thinks for a moment he’s killed Fatty.

Kennedy was the paramount purveyor of frustration. In more than 500 films, he played grumpy cops, judges, tradesmen, homeowners, and my favorite, “An Innocent Bystander.” His long slow takes to the camera, usually accompanied by a pulling down of hand across the face or a perplexed drumming of fingers on his own noggin, are best remembered from later Laurel and Hardy outings, and the hapless lemonade vendor in the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup.”

Interesting and overlooked, he made more than 100 “Average Man” short subjects over a 17-year period for RKO. Kennedy was the centerpiece of an ongoing domestic comedy that foreshadowed the situation comedy of radio’s “Life of Reilly” and TV’s “The Honeymooners.”

In 1921, a death at a party hosted by Arbuckle led to rape and murder charges against him. After three highly publicized trials, he was acquitted – but it was too late. His career was ruined, and many of his films were destroyed by the studios, who couldn’t see why anyone would want to ever see them again. He made 154 films before the scandal; he made 11 after. He died in 1933, at the age of 46. Great contemporary comic actors such as John Candy, John Belushi, and Chris Farley all expressed interest in playing Arbuckle in a film biography; all three died tragically young before it could happen.

The NFR Project is an attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry, in chronological order. Next time: the original vamp, Theda Bara, in ‘A Fool There Was.’

The NFR Project #45: 'The Cheat'

Fannie Ward and Sessue Hayakawa in 'The Cheat.'

The Cheat

Dir: Cecil B. DeMille (uncred.)

Prod: DeMille, Jesse L. Lasky (uncred.)

Scr: Hector Turnbull, Jeanie Macpherson

Phot: Alvin Wycoff

Premiere: December 13, 1915

59 min.

  

From the start, Sessue Hayakawa was under the gun. The son of a powerful Japanese official, he intended to join the military, but a ruptured eardrum prevented him, after he dove too deeply on a dare. His shame led him to attempt suicide. After his recovery, it was decided he would become a banker, so in 1911 he was sent to the University of Chicago for studies.

After two years, he decided to quit school and return home. While waiting for a ship in San Francisco, he joined an amateur theatrical, The Typhoon. Producer Thomas Ince, always on the lookout for material to adapt, offered to make a film out of the production. It was a hit, and Hayakawa was a hot property, an early star who made ungodly amounts of money playing the prototypes of film’s “exotic” lovers and Oriental villains.

Hayakawa was charismatic, and a quiet and controlled actor. His underplaying (he later became a Zen priest, and cited its influence as a factor in his subdued acting) was perfect for film, and had a bit of impact in the transition from stage acting to a toned-down, more naturalistic acting style in film.

Nonetheless, he was chained to stereotypes. His work was despised and even banned in Japan, where it was felt he was reinforcing prejudices. He was hugely popular in America, but despite his stardom, the laws of the day wouldn’t allow him to become an American citizen and marry outside his “race.” He was a human place marker for the Other in American film culture. (He turned down the lead in 1921’s The Sheik, thereby making the career of the then-obscure Rudolph Valentino, who then became the stereotypical “Latin lover.”)

The Cheat could be a standard melodrama – the Asian villain is the only fresh element of a stale tale. The cheat of the title is Edith Hardy, the flight wife of hard-working stockbroker Richard. She spends his money as fast as he makes it, and seems to be perpetually dressed like a decorative top or Dresden doll. When she finds herself in a financial jam (she speculates on the market with the Red Cross funds!), one of her wealthy society friends Hishuru Tori offers to help her out – for a price (wink, wink).

When Edith tries to return his borrowed money to him, an enraged Tori tries to have his way with her, as they used to say. When she resists past the point of his tolerance, he grapples her and thrusts the burning, red-hot metal stamp bearing his seal into her shoulder. Gadzooks! She shoots him in the shoulder.

Fortunately, her suspicious husband is close behind, and Tori’s doors are made of rice paper. He bursts into the room, and quickly takes responsibility for the shooting. An extravagant amount of suffering goes on for a time save for the imperturbable Tori, who sullenly smokes with his arm in a sling.

Of course, Richard goes on trial for shooting Tori, and in a sweeping climax Edith leaps to her feet, confesses all, and bares the insidious mark on her scapula. Pandemonium erupts, as all the right-thinking people watching the trial spring to their feet as one and become a lynch mob hot for Tori’s blood. The verdict is set aside, and husband and wife embrace.

Clearly, insufferable Edith to blame for all that ensues here, but in keeping with American melodrama and racism, the villainy is projected onto the Other. As Tori, Hayakawa is scornful, haughty, untrustworthy, lustful, sly, mysterious, and grim – all qualities ascribed to any despised minority. When he is provoked, a sadistic streaks manifests itself – a kind of “barbaric” behavior that illustrates the idea that Asians are not quite human. His branding of Edith is like his branding of his collectibles earlier – “That means it belongs to me,” he says in intertitle – reduces her to an object, if not more accurately livestock.

But is the salvation much better? Throughout the film, Richard treats Edith like a silly, wayward child, which is disturbing when you remember that they are playing grown-up, married characters. Is it better for a woman to be treated like a slow child or an object? This no-win situation has not improved much in cinema down the decades.

The brisk story is expertly directed by Cecil B. DeMille, who made a splash the previous year with his rookie effort The Squaw Man, the first feature film to be made in Hollywood. (To show you the pace of production in early Hollywood, The Cheat was DeMille’s 23^rd film in less than a year.) DeMille had much experience in theater under such top impresarios of the day as Charles Frohman and David Belasco. DeMille’s solid visual sense makes maximum use of silhouette and shadow, key lighting, close-ups, and pacing to create and effective and entertaining story. This quality, linked to others and harnessed to bigger and bigger extravaganzas, soon made DeMille the most successful producer-director of his era.

The racism is unfeigned and palpable. Complaints from the Japanese-American population led the villain’s identity being changed for the 1918 re-release. Instead of a Japanese person, Haka Arakau, a “Burmese ivory king” (presumably there was an insufficient amount of Burmese-Americans to be concerned about). Despite this distinction, the cultural damage is the same.

The phrase in the air at the time was “Yellow Peril,” a fear of Asian immigrants’ “invasion” (sound familiar?) common to Western culture but seeing its most intense manifestation in xenophobic America. It was encoded in prejudicial laws, immigration restrictions, and mob violence. Anti-Asian portrayals and caricatures continued at least until 1961, when Mickey Rooney’s “yellowface” performance in Breakfast at Tiffany’s became the proverbial straw.

So did Hayakawa help or hinder Asian perceptions? He used his profits not only to live lavishly but to form his own independent film production company, and made 32 films in four years, Asian-American films that attempted to get beyond Asian stereotypes. They failed.

He became a journeyman artist. Trapped inadvertently in France when the Nazis invaded, he promptly joined the French underground. He gave an Oscar-nominated performance as Colonel Saito in Lean’s great 1957 The Bridge on the River Kwai, then retired and focused on business and spiritual matters. He wrote, he painted, and he lived. He was quite a Renaissance man. Only lately are we able to see the man through the mas of contradictions he endured.

The NFR Project is an attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry, in chronological order. Next time: ‘Fatty’s Tintype Tangle.’

The NFR Project #44: 'The Birth of a Nation' (1915)

The Birth of a Nation

Dir: D.W. Griffith

Prod: Griffith, Harry Aitken (uncred.)

Scr: Thomas Dixon Jr., from his novel and play The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan; Griffith, and Frank E. Woods

Phot: Billy Bitzer

Premiere: February 8, 1915

Between 125 - 195 min.

  

It would be a vast impertinence to attempt to measure this film in a few hundred words. Nonetheless.

This is the kind of movie, were it a museum exhibit, you would rush the children past it, shielding their eyes. That this, the first mature American masterpiece of film happens to be a vile piece of racist trash is not news. This film was just as problematic when it as released as it is today – it caused riots and was banned in several cities. It was also insanely popular, earning more money than any film until Gone with the Wind 24 years later, perhaps more than any film ever made. It was among the first films to be screened at the White House (Woodrow Wilson, a progressive, was also a racist). It’s said to have sparked the revival of the Klu Klux Klan, and to have made Louis B. Mayer’s fortune.

It’s America’s first epic, appropriately about one of America’s epic conflicts. The innovative and prolific Griffith, who took seven years to become America’s most accomplished film director, took everything he had learned and wove it into a grand tapestry of techniques subordinated to the idea of telling a long story, populated with many characters – a novelistic approach that mainstream film cozied up to for some time.

Unfortunately, choosing the Southern cause to champion, complete with its depiction of black people as animals, cunning, lustful, malicious, and lazy – portrayed mainly by white men in blackface as a civilization-threatening force to be put down and controlled by white Christian men. (Ostentatiously, and perhaps placed there in exculpatory fashion after the outcry of the initial release, a title card states primly at the beginning of Part II, “This is an historical presentation of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and is not meant to reflect on any race or people of today,” then defensively quotes Wilson, marking him as an endorser of the film, witting or no.)

The story intertwines the fates of two families, North and South (both white of course), and how the Civil War and Reconstruction plays hazard with their loves and fortunes. Radical Republicanism and anyone unwhite person are the interfering enemies. The viewer is forced, as with Reifenstahl’s Trumph of the Will, to put aside the content in order to admire the technique, but only long enough to do so. The full-length live orchestral score, frame tinting, and the compelling pallette of technique made the film compulsively watchable, despite its original three-hour-plus length (Joseph Breil’s love theme for the film, titled “The Perfect Song,” became the theme for another beloved and racist American cultural institution – radio’s Amos ‘n Andy show.) It made the careers of actors such as Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Henry B. Walthall, and others.

It would be a relief to say that it’s an antiquated document that outlines prejudices that no longer exist, but recent events speak otherwise. The regressive rise of racism and intolerance is a strong backlash in American culture today. It’s a movie you have to watch – once. The Birth of a Nation helps us remember how close those sentiments are to the surface and how great art can push bad intent. It’s a monstrous masterpiece.

The NFR Project is an attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry, in chronological order. Next time: ‘The Cheat.’