Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle | His Wife’s Mistakes / 1916

the real thing

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (director) His Wife’s Mistakes / 1916

 

Played out primarily in the Shortacre Building in New York City and the nearby Oriental Café, Roscoe Arbuckle’s His Wife’s Mistakes, much like The Waiters’ Ball, is bifurcated. It begins, however, quite remarkably with a long series of cuts revealing the comings and goings of figures throughout the large lobby of the building, conveying it as a place of commerce and business, including on the first floor, a flower shop, a barber, and other stores beyond the offices that lie above. The first scenes are some of the best in Arbuckle’s career, and have little to do with his comic attentions, but clearly demonstrate his power as a filmmaker.

      Once he appears as an actor, however, everything changes as his character undergoes a traditional comic schtick as he is turned around several times in the revolving door before finally escaping it only to have lost his hat, which sucks him into the circular motions of the door once more.

      For some explicable reason, Arbuckle’s character uses the offices of I. Steele—perhaps just attracted by the surprisingly honest name of its major inhabitant, Mr. I Steele (William Jefferson) or a friendship with the office boy (Al St. John)—as his home base. There, reading the newspaper, he discovers a job opening in the same building as a janitor, a position he immediately applies for and obtains.

     The next long several scenes are devoted to his various disasters as the new janitor’s ineptitude sends people slipping about the floor where he’s left a bar of soap and others being banged, shoved, and pushed due his broom, buckets, and body, as well as—after the barber and the candy shop owner both ask him to look after their stores while they run errands—a man receiving a shave with a milkshake mistakenly mixed up with a cup of shaving cream, all which reminds one somewhat of the later skits of  W. C. Fields.

     Finishing up for the day, Arbuckle shares an elevator with a thoroughbred sissy, Percy Dovewing, who given the janitor’s startled politeness is taken with the man, asking him, as they exit on the same floor, to point out the office he is seeking, who, providing him with the direction he awards with a pinch on the cheek.

     Mr. Steele in the meantime has heard from R. U. Stout that he is ready to close a deal, and that the contracts must be signed by 3:00 that afternoon. Needing to run out on related business, Steele leaves a note for his wife (who presumably he knows will be visiting the office) to look after Stout until he returns. Instead of Stout, of course, it is the new janitor who arrives in Steele’s office, Mrs. Steele (Minta Durfee) inquiring, “R. U. Stout?” to which obviously Arbuckle cannot but reply in the affirmative.

     The gracious Mrs. Steele immediately whisks him away, much to the office employee’s shock, for lunch at the Oriental Café.

      To suggest that Arbuckle is unacquainted with the world of fine dining would be a vast understatement, as he immediately attempts to wash up his hands and face in the nearby ice-bucket where a bottle of champagne lays in rest and clean his nails with the chopsticks. And who should arrive at the nearest table, but Percy of course, who, recognizing the kind man who provided him with directions, begins to flirt, with Arbuckle responding by putting a lampshade on his head and attempting to squirt a Selzer-bottle in his direction but which soaks him and Mrs. Steele instead.

    Moving Picture World, the trade journal that published synopses of most new movies from 1907-1927, describes the restaurant as a “gay café,” which must be the case since suddenly as the intertitles tells us “the fun begins.” Water nymphs suddenly appear floating upon and above the nearby pool as confetti descends from the ceiling and appears to roll across the floor, Percy and the janitor continuing their flirtatious games, Percy tossing balloons at the janitor, and Arbuckle filling them up with Selzer water before lobbing them back. Their friendly fight escalates until, when his luncheon plate appears, Arbuckle tosses the food into the face of the shocked Dovewing who upon his protests is thrown into the pool by the janitor.

    Discovering that his wife has gone off with the janitor instead of Stout, Steele rushes to the restaurant, attempting to shoot the fool janitor dead, obviously missing the deadline of the businessman from Showme, Missouri who arrives at Steele’s office to discover that there is no one there to sign.

      The true importance of this film is not the crazy high jinks that appear to be the center of discussion for most of the few commentators of this film, but the fact that perhaps for the first time ever a full-blown homosexual has been presented as a character on screen. Percy may be effeminate and a stereotype of gay men, but he is not hiding in drag or simpering in the corner, but actually engages in action with the major characters of the movie.

      I have already noted the existence of “sissy” figures in other films, most of them lost; but Percy, other than Mauritz Stiller’s character Claude Zoret of The Wings of this same year, is the first full-bodied homosexual we will not see until Richard Oswald’s tortured violinist in his Different from the Others of 1919.

      Whereas Zoret and his admirer Mikaël’s relationship and even their sexuality is tenuous and only hinted at in Stiller’s now incomplete film, Arbuckle’s Percy is the real thing, a flirtatious, hand fluttering, hip sashaying fairy who is utterly ready to play with any man who’s game. And in this wonderful little gem, our childlike janitor is just such a man.

      Interestingly, the Moving Picture World synopsis reports that Stout also arrives at the restaurant, “prevents a murder,” and gets the papers signed before the expiration date, while the film as it exists today doesn’t represent that at all. The end remains an old-fashioned shooting match in which Steele attempts to kill the fool who took advantage of his wife, a heterosexual entitlement evidently even more important than a business transaction.

 

Los Angeles, January 31, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).