Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle | The Cook / 1918

smooth operators

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (screenwriter and director) The Cook / 1918

 

Using a great deal of his material from The Waiter’s Ball (1916), Arbuckle turns his cooking methods into even more deft and amazing feats as he not only flips griddle cakes, tosses his heavy knife over his shoulder to have it land perfectly upon the cutting board behind him, but throws plated orders through the air to have them land expertly into the waiter’s (in this case Buster Keaton) hands.

     Equally masterfully, Keaton serves up food to the Bull Pup restaurant customers so effortlessly that he’s turned it into a true art. At one moment in particular, asking a beautiful woman for her order, he awaits her words so intently that the always good-looking Keaton suddenly attains the look that is so beautiful that he attains something close to the glamour of the male matinee favorites like Clark Gable and Cary Grant.

 

     Similar to Al St. John in the earlier movie, Keaton also yells out the orders in a coarse restaurant lingo, but even his choices of names for common dishes are wittier than in the 1916 film.

     The only awkward moment is when the restaurant manager, finding his waiter intensely talking to the Cashier (Alice Lake), pushes him toward the customers so hard that Keaton is sent spinning onto the kitchen chopping block at the very moment when the cook is swinging down his large cleaver to chop up the mutton into pieces. Together they carefully inspect his body to make sure the knife missed it. Fortunately, he’s all intact.

      A few minutes later, a belly dancer begins her routine. Keaton is so caught up in the music and the sensation of the routine that he begins to imitate it and dance along, turning the convolutions of the dancer’s body into something closer to Egyptian hieroglyphics.

       Dancing into the kitchen, the waiter even begins to affect the cook as Arbuckle, caught up in the light-footing, jabs a flower onto a strainer and fits it atop his head, appending small pans and lids to his ears and breasts and a whisk pan to his lower stomach that bears a close resemblance to Theda Bara in her film Salomé (1918), Keaton bringing in John the Baptist’s head of lettuce. Eventually grabbing up a few links of sausage and holding it out like the adder Arbuckle shifts to portray Bara in her Cleopatra (1917) before putting it to his breast. Both films are now lost.

       If we can’t precisely describe this as drag, it is at least a stunningly delicate parody of female impersonation that only Arbuckle could have so cleverly pulled off.

       Throughout this highly entertaining scenes Arbuckle and Keaton have worked as a team of remarkably smooth operators. Would that the rest of the film were so inventive.

       The only narrative link between events comes in the form of the “tough guy” (Al St. John) who, suddenly appearing in the café, grabs the cashier and pulls her into an apaché dance. Keaton grabs a bottle of wine as if he might slug the villain over the head, but the tough guy merely takes it out of his hand breaks off the top and drinks, spitting out the excess glass.

       When the manager takes up a knife, St. John’s character grabs that away from as well and threatens mayhem. But there is one left to save them, the bull dog (Luke) who grabs onto the bad guy’s leg and won’t let go. When the tough guy finally breaks away and runs, Luke is on his heels, an adventure that continues into the next day when, finally, in an attempt to truly escape him, St. John climbs a ladder to the restaurant roof.

        Below we have just been entertained by a long skit of different methods of eating spaghetti, Keaton gathering up into a cup and cutting away any unsightly overhanging “threads,” before slurping it up like coffee. The cook winds it around his finger and feeds the coils into his mouth, later sucking it up along with his necktie. At one point he seems to be knitting a pattern out of its threads. But the manager and the dishwasher, sitting at opposite ends of the table, pull the swallow the strands by pulling and sucking, at one point each of them attempting to process the same long thread spanning the long end of the tabletop before Keaton and Arbuckle put a scissors to it, both falling back in their efforts. And at the same moment, the crook comes crashing down upon the table top, Luke chasing him once more off.

       The next day, a day off, the cook decides to go fishing with a rod as long as vaulting pole, while the cashier and the waiter take in what seem to be the rides on Coney Island, beginning with a goat cart. The tough guy shows up again as the cashier attempts to enjoy a ride, and in her bid to escape she crawls to the very top of ride and dives into the ocean where she spends nearly the rest of movie in distress as Keaton and Arbuckle attempt to find a rope, a life buoy, or any other means of saving her without success. Of course, ultimately they fall in themselves, along with the villain; but as the intertitles explain the three survive while the villain drowns.

 

Los Angeles, January 31, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 31, 2023)