The Butcher Boy (1917)
released 23rd April 1917
Cast:
Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle
Buster Keaton
Al St. John
Josephine Stevens
Arthur Earle
Joe Bordeaux
The Butcher Boy (1917)
Comedy
22m
Comique Film
Director:
Writer:
Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle
"Jos. M. Schenck presents FATTY ARBUCKLE in a scream in two reels..."
In September 1916, Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle parted company with Mack Sennett, whose Keystone Studios had been his home since 1913. In that time, he had risen to become one of screen comedy’s biggest stars.
Arbuckle was about to sign a $200,000 deal with Metro, arranged by Max Hart, when Lou Anger, a former vaudevillian just starting out as a theatrical agent, promised he could arrange a better deal. Anger arranged for Arbuckle to meet Joe Schenck in Atlantic City. Schenck, then a producer of low-budget movies, was looking to elevate his status and had contacts at Paramount, which sometimes distributed his movies. He proposed Arbuckle have his own production company, whose films Paramount would distribute. Paramount, having failed to entice Charlie Chaplin, was keen to lure a major comic star and offered Arbuckle complete script and cast approval, a salary of $5,000 per week, and a 10 percent share of profits. As a bonus for signing, they also threw in a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost.
The news broke in September 1916. Arbuckle’s production company was to be called Comique—which the roly-poly star pronounced ‘Cum-eek-ee’. However, a skin infection on his leg, which entered his bloodstream, prevented him from starting work immediately. His condition worsened, and for a while, amputation looked possible. Fortunately, medics at the Kaspare Cohn Hospital in Los Angeles saved it. By then, though, Arbuckle had another problem. He had grown addicted to the morphine administered to manage the excruciating pain and had to undergo a cold-turkey withdrawal program. By the time he left hospital cured, the comic known for his immense girth had lost almost 80lbs.
By March 1917, Arbuckle was in New York preparing to shoot his first shorts for Comique. While walking through Times Square one day Lou Anger (or possibly Joe Schenck—accounts differ) ran into a young stage comic he knew from his days in vaudeville. Buster Keaton had not long arrived in the city after breaking up the Three Keatons, a popular stage act in which he performed with his parents. Keaton had just signed with Max Hart to appear in a musical revue called The Passing Show, but Anger encouraged him to try his luck in movies and arranged a meeting with Arbuckle.
Keaton was a little reluctant to appear in movies, influenced over the years, perhaps, by his father Joe, who had always dismissed flickers as beneath him. Unlike his father, however, Keaton enjoyed movies. He had seen Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914), and The Birth of a Nation (1915) had convinced him of cinema’s potential. He agreed to meet Arbuckle at his studio on East 48th Street the next morning and arrived to find him shooting a scene set in a general store. The two comics chatted while the crew set up the next scene. Arbuckle knew and liked the Keatons’ act and invited Buster to join the cast. Adding another member to the shoot didn’t pose a problem as Arbuckle worked without a script. “Not a scrap of scenario paper in my studio,” he once said. “I wouldn’t know what to do with a manuscript in my hand. I plan out the pictures, and we rehearse them—that’s all.” Arbuckle was shooting The Butcher Boy, a comic short which marked the beginning of a three-year partnership that would transform the careers of both men.
Arbuckle proved to be a generous and invaluable mentor to his new sidekick. “Roscoe—none of us who knew him personally ever called him Fatty—took the camera apart for me so I would understand how it worked and what it could do. He showed me how film was developed, cut, and then spliced together.” Keaton also warmed to the idea of working in the ‘flickers’: “I had no more idea than anyone else at the time what the growth of pictures was to be,” he recalled. “One feature of the films did appeal to me, and that was that it would mean staying in one place for a while. I had been travelling on the road for over twenty years. I took my gamble and cast my lot with the pictures.”
Buster Keaton, Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle and Al St. John
The film takes place in the grocery store of Mr. Grouch (Arthur Earle) where Fatty (Arbuckle) and his sweetheart, Almondine (Josephine Stevens), Grouch’s daughter, work. Slim, played by Arbuckle’s nephew, Al St. John, is another employee and also Fatty’s rival for Almondine’s hand. Keaton plays a customer who comes in to buy molasses. From his very first scene, he wears his familiar pork pie hat. “In those days, almost every comedian you saw affected a derby hat,” he recalled. “Even Harold Lloyd, when he was playing his Lonesome Luke character in 1917, wore a derby…So I decided to get a hat that was my very own. I knew straw was too fragile for my kind of antics, so I chose felt and designed this particular pork pie. I took a good Stetson and cut it down, then I stiffened the brim with sugar water.”
After inspecting some brooms, one of which he nimbly scoops off the floor with his foot, Buster gets his hat stuck to his head after Arbuckle has used it as a temporary receptacle for the molasses while retrieving the coin Keaton left in his empty pail. He then gets his foot stuck to the floor, and Arbuckle has to manhandle him free. The episode ends with an energetic free-for-all with Arbuckle, Keaton, and St. John hurling bags of flour at one another.
“Roscoe explained the technique in pictures was different from the stage,” Keaton remembered, “particularly in taking a pie or a pot of molasses in the face, because the toughest thing is to keep from flinching when you see it come. We’re doing a scene in a bakery and there are a lot of three-pound sacks of flour lying about. Fatty picks one up and throws it at the baker who ducks, and I get it. So he explains: ‘Now, Buster, you just keep looking over in that direction until I say turn. When you turn, it’ll be there.’ So I do just like he says and look away until he says turn. Bowf! I get it. I thought my neck was broken. It exploded just like a bomb. That Arbuckle was a dead shot, and that sack came with all his three-hundred pounds behind it. My eyes, nose, and ears were filled with flour—but it got the laugh.”
The action switches to Miss Teachem’s School for Girls in the second half of the picture. Almondine’s father has sent her there because of the rowdiness she has caused, but her two suitors follow, both dressing as girls to gain entry. Keaton’s late addition to the cast feels more apparent in this sequence, as he does little and feels like a superfluous character. Perhaps because his only contribution to this part of the picture is a couple of acrobatic falls, it feels rather stale compared to the grocery store sequence.
After nine months away from the screen, Paramount’s publicity department ensured there was huge anticipation for their newest star’s first release for them. The Butcher Boy was released on 23rd April 1917; although better was to follow from the duo, it was an enormous hit, scoring both with audiences and the critics. Describing the film as ‘a whale of a comedy,’ Ben Grimm, writing in Moving Picture World, said, “If one laugh weighed an ounce, “The Butcher Boy”…would weigh as much as Fatty himself.” Of Keaton’s performance, George N. Shorey of Motion Picture News wrote, “Buster Keaton as the village pest, well known in vaudeville, makes his entrance into pictures by taking an amazing amount of punishment as the recipient of Fatty’s bouquets, from flour sacks to the ever-present pie. He gets a bombardment that lays him flat in falls that are not fake and would mean a broken neck to anyone not in perfect physical shape.”
Keaton would have earned $250 a week for The Passing Show. He forgot to ask how much Arbuckle would pay, and when he opened his first pay packet, he discovered his weekly wage was just $40. He didn’t care. “I’d fallen in love with the movies,” he said. “With the cameras, with the rushes, the action, the slam-bang—with all of it.”
Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life, James Curtis; Room 1219, Greg Merritt; Moving Picture World, 28th April 1917; Motion Picture News, 28th April 1917.