Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle | His Wedding Night / 1917

cents of smell

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (screenwriter and director) His Wedding Night / 1917

 

Roscoe Arbuckle’s His Wedding Night, released in late August of 1917, steals a great portion of its story from his own April release of that year, The Butcher Boy in that “Fatty” works behind the counter of a store, in this case a soda fountain, from which he can once more display his remarkable juggling and culinary talents that appear in many other of his films as well, such as The Waiter’s Ball (1916) and The Cook (1918). As in the Butcher Boy, moreover, his character is again in competition for the bosses’ daughter, Alice (Alice Mann) with the local ne’er-do-well played by Al St. John, one of the most remarkable actors in Arbuckle’s small company. This time, however, her father has already promised her in marriage to Fatty, the fact of which further infuriates the suitor who, in this case, has no intentions of giving up his “rights” to the local beauty.

      This short film has more than the usual number of distasteful, racist, sexist, and even criminal scenes which one must sit through in order to glean its comic entertainment values. At the center of several of these incidents is a bottle of perfume, which is free for sampling. The temptation of the “free” perfume bottle, however, is far too great for the customers of this small-town emporium who all seek out a better self-fragrance. We first see a handsome woman applying more than a “sample” to her face and other body parts, which leads the counterman to reprimand her, but as she turns away a black woman has replaced her, sampling the perfume in profusion, and when Fatty turns back, apparently with the intent to make it up with the woman by giving her a hug he puts his arm around the black woman instead, an act which delights her but is a comic faux pas in the racist US of the day. But even worse, while she has turned, the hand-written sign announcing the expensive perfume’s price, “$4 an oz,” has been imprinted into the backside of her dress (even more ludicrously, not in reverse), suggesting as one commentator has observed, “within living memory of slavery,” that she is for sale.

     Even more egregious, from the counterman’s perspective, is when an effeminate dandy (Arthur Earle) also takes the opportunity to spray the bottle’s contents upon his cheeks, hands, and netherparts, proof enough that he’s a sissy. So outranged is Fatty that he empties the bottle of the remaining perfume and fills it with chloroform. The next customer to check out the bottle, however, is a lovely young woman who sprays its contents liberally on her body before Fatty can prevent her, knocking her out cold. Passed out on a fountain stool, her lovely lips lure Fatty in for an unwitnessed kiss; but realizing that his boss still sits at a nearby table, Fatty sprays some of the “perfume” on him as well, rendering him into a non compos mentis witness to the couple of kisses the soda jerk steals from those lips before he applies the smelling salts to bring the miss around. All of which reminds us, obviously, that Bill Cosby did not invent date rape.

      Having been successful the first time around, Fatty tries his luck on the next woman who enters the store, only to discover that the chloroform has utterly no effect on her, even when she finally drinks it. Either this gal has been nipping on the side or she is a vampire long before her time.

 

     While her fiancé plays the field below, in her upstairs bedroom Alice is planning for her wedding. And at that very moment, Buster Keaton, as a delivery boy, is speeding up to the front stoop of the store, where upon he crashes his bike, flips over forward (from childhood on he had worked as a kind of abused acrobat), knocks over the cracker-jack gent sitting on its front porch, and somehow manages to poke something in his left eye that leaves him winking and blinking through the rest of the movie.

     Keaton immediately bellies up the soda bar, winking at Fatty in a manner that might, in fact, be read as flirtatious. But obviously context is everything, and the barman interprets it as a sign that he asking from something “under the counter” so to speak, and immediately pours him a pint of stout, which the delivery boy drinks down without hesitation while Fatty, in cartoon mode, proffers up not only a foot rest for the bar but a spittoon and, in a final flourish, a little sawdust.

      The boy then proceeds upstairs, still on the blink, to deliver up the wedding dress to Alice. She insists, however, that she has to see it modeled, forcing him to undress—with her encouragement, behind a screen—and don the bride’s gown, turning this film, like so many of Arbuckle’s other shorts, into a brief drag show, while unconsciously justifying the character’s odd eye-tick.

 

      Indeed, things become more complicated as, at that very moment, the suitor returns, this time to rape (“carry off”) the bride-to-be to a local judge of the peace. Realizing that her model has been kidnapped, Alice goes racing off to get her dress back at the same moment that Fatty, hearing Alice has been spirited off, chases the suitor and his gang, all ending up a free-for-all, with Fatty and Alice being reunited at the last moment after it’s discovered that the kidnapped bride is only the winking deliverer of bad news. The judge is ready to marry them, but when asked to pay out the money for the wedding, Fatty sprays some “perfume” on the judge before he can even ask the important questions, just to get his money back.

       

Los Angeles, March 3, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).