Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916)
released 9th January 1916
Cast:
Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle
Mabel Normand
Al St. John
Frank Hayes
Mai Wells
Wayland Trask
Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916)
Comedy
33m
Triangle-Keystone
Director:
Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle
Writer:
Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle
"...when it comes to 'Fatty and Mabel Adrift' the big top note of comedy has been reached..."
In 1916, after a series of successful shorts for Mack Sennett’s Keystone, the comedy team of Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle and Mabel Normand had become a headline act. In 1914, Sennett needed a comedy duo capable of competing with Vitagraph’s John Bunny and Flora Finch. Bunny, a rotund comic with a florid complexion, and his stick-thin foil made an incongruous pairing, but had enjoyed runaway success in around 160 short films.
Arbuckle joined Keystone in 1913, but Sennett initially failed to appreciate his comic potential. It was Mabel, already a star by then, who suggested him for the part. The seasoned comedienne coached Arbuckle, already an experienced vaudevillian, in the art of screen comedy, and the pair became close friends. While other Keystone employees called him ‘Fatty’, a nickname he detested, she dubbed him Big Otto because “he looked German, like someone named Otto.” Their close friendship resulted in a unique on-screen chemistry.
Normand had been Mack Sennett’s lover since 1909, but their affair was cooling by 1915, despite her announcing to friends that they had set a wedding date of 4th July. Things came to a head when the actress found Sennett in a compromising situation with her close friend Mae Busch.
According to Minta Durfee, Arbuckle’s wife, Normand received a call from actress Anne Luther instructing her to go to Sennett’s room at the Hillview Hotel and Apartments at 6531 Hollywood Boulevard. This she did, to find Sennett answering the door in his boxer shorts while Busch tried to hide behind a sofa in her negligee. In the altercation that followed, Busch hurled a vase that struck Normand on the forehead. Brushing aside Sennett’s attempts to stem the heavy flow of blood from her wound, Normand staggered from the hotel and took a cab to Arbuckle and Durfee’s Santa Monica home. Durfee recalled, “We heard what we thought was an animal suffering. Then we saw the door of the taxi open, and there was the driver carrying Mabel, who was cradled in his arms, up to our porch. There was blood all over Mabel’s face and hair. It was streaming down her neck and all over her body.”
The couple summoned a doctor who was known for his discretion. He told them that the actress, who was by now only semi-conscious and rambling, must go immediately to a hospital. There, she fell into a coma. Her life hung in the balance. Doctors decided she needed an operation to drain some of the blood from her head. While she recovered from the operation, the studio issued a statement that she had been struck by a boot while filming a wedding scene.
The actress suffered both emotional and physical trauma. Gossip columnist Adela Rogers St. John claimed she witnessed Normand attempt suicide by jumping off the Santa Monica Pier. Increasing abuse of drugs and alcohol slowed her recovery, but throughout it all she refused to accept any form of apology from Sennett.
By then, both Normand and Arbuckle were tiring of Sennett’s frantic slapstick style of comedy. They had made thirty-five films together since 1913 and wanted a move towards ‘dramatic comedy’ with more nuanced characterisation and emotional shading. Both felt this was impossible under Keystone’s regime.
Harry and Roy Aitken’s new Triangle studio – which combined the talents of Thomas Ince, D. W. Griffith and Sennett – potentially offered them a way forward. Triangle sought to position itself as a quality brand, an ambition which dovetailed with the duo’s ambitions. Sennett, needing to placate his former lover and her favourite co-star – who was also his biggest asset – allowed them to travel east to produce films. Normand, who had connections in New York, may well have played a part in negotiating this move with Triangle’s executives. Before they could move to Fort Lee, however, Arbuckle and Normand had one last film to shoot on the West Coast.
Many consider Fatty and Mabel Adrift to be their finest work together. Filming, under the working title House by the Sea, took place at Keystone’s Edendale studio and on location at Castle Rock Beach and Los Angeles Harbor, and was completed in late December 1915. Triangle-Keystone released it under its new title of Fatty and Mabel Adrift on 9th January 1916.
Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle
Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle and Luke in Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916)
Arbuckle both wrote and directed the simple tale in which he plays a farm boy who marries his sweetheart, Mabel. The young couple, accompanied by Arbuckle’s dog Luke, move into a beach house bought for them by Mabel’s parents. But Arbuckle’s jealous rival (played by his nephew, Al St. John) and a gang of ruffians set the house adrift into the ocean at high tide. The following morning, the newlyweds awaken to find their beds awash and the house floating out to sea. Arbuckle sends Luke for help, and a frantic rescue attempt follows while the desperate couple attempt to cope with the flooding house.
The film ran for three reels – at least one reel longer than the usual Keystone comedy. This allowed Arbuckle to blend moments of romantic sentiment and genuine suspense into Keystone’s more familiar style of slapstick farce. Unshackled from Sennett’s close supervision, he rejected the studio’s tendency to favour action over pictorial refinement. He composed more artistic shots, such as silhouetting his characters beneath a bright sun shining on a secluded beach. The film opens with shots of him and Normand, each framed by a heart. When the hearts interlink, Cupid’s arrow pins them together. The film also introduces Al St. John, playing Arbuckle’s rival, within a heart, but his swiftly crumbles. In another scene, Arbuckle’s shadow descends a wall to place a phantom kiss on his sleeping wife’s lips. These are not the kind of scenes found in a conventional Keystone comedy.
The plot also departs from the Keystone template. Normand’s screen parents (May Wells and Frank Hayes) approve of their daughter’s choice of beau; the usual Keystone plot device was for the parents to disapprove of him. Not only that, they dislike their neighbour’s son (St. John), who also hopes to wed Normand. Arbuckle’s screen nemesis is a textbook example of the Keystone villain, illustrating how Arbuckle merged his artistic vision with Sennett’s commercial sensibilities.
The longer running time also allowed Arbuckle to construct a three-act structure. Keystone’s films from this period usually merely built a sequence of gags around a loose situation. In Fatty and Mabel Adrift, we have a complete narrative: Arbuckle and Normand’s courtship and wedding, followed by their honeymoon, and then the crisis/rescue.
While Arbuckle shows his agility and willingness to take pratfalls, his character here is fully rounded - he’s an affectionate, bumbling husband rather than merely a gluttonous grotesque. Normand adheres more closely to the sweet, open heroine familiar to audiences, but the longer running time allows her more lingering close-ups than usual. Luke, the couple’s pit bull, completes the contented family unit. Curiously, the credits incorrectly identify Luke as Teddy, a Great Dane who also made films for Keystone, most notably Teddy at the Throttle (1917). Luke was Arbuckle and Durfee’s own pet, gifted to Durfee by director Wilfred Lucas in lieu of payment for a dangerous stunt she performed in one of his pictures. The pet, whom the couple named after Lucas, appeared in ten Arbuckle movies over five years and reputedly earned $150 per week at the height of his fame.
The film’s climactic ‘house at sea’ sequence provides the film’s technical peak. Collapsing buildings were a mainstay of Keystone films, but Arbuckle enlarged the concept, wringing an extended sequence of gags from within multiple rooms, which rock as if genuinely afloat. Arbuckle also used rapid cross-cutting between the endangered couple, the villains on shore, and the rescuers dashing to the rescue using bicycles and boats. By doing so, he built suspense while maintaining the slapstick content.
Fatty and Mabel Adrift stands as the peak achievement of the Arbuckle-Normand comedy partnership. It also marked the beginning of the end: in early 1916, Normand announced her departure from Keystone. She briefly rejoined under the Mabel Normand Film Company banner before finally moving to Goldwyn in 1917. Arbuckle departed in July 1916, and in 1917, he became an independent producer for Joseph Schenk under the Comique Film Corporation banner.
Sources: Room 1219: The Life of Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal that Changed Hollywood, Greg Merritt; Mabel Normand: The Life and Career of a Hollywood Madcap, Timothy Dean Lefler; Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle: A Biography of the Silent Film Comedian, Stuart Oderman; A Silent Siren Song: The Aitken Brothers’ Hollywood Odyssey, 1905-1926, Al P. Nelson; Mabel, Betty Harper Fussell; Mack Sennett’s Fun Factory, Brent E. Walker; Mack Sennett’s Keystone: The Man, the Myth, and the Comedies, Kalton C. Lahue; Moving Image, Vol 6, Issue 1; Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett, Simon Louvish.