Leap Year

Lord Chief Justice. Your means are very slender, and your waste is
great.
Falstaff. I would it were otherwise; I would my means were greater
and my waist slenderer.

Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I


Mack Sennett, the father of American film comedy, had an eye for talent. He made millions of dollars with his one-reelers that were shown everywhere that films could reach. But he could never hang on to his talented performers because he refused to pay them more than he was making. One by one, his most successful comics, including Charlie Chaplin, Harry Langdon, and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, left Sennett for more lucrative contracts with other movie studios.

In his groundbreaking essay, "Comedy's Greatest Era" (1949), James Agee concentrated on the Big Four - the four most dominant silent film comics, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Harry Langdon. Walter Kerr's book The Silent Clowns (1976) does the same, while granting additional space to the silent films of Laurel and Hardy, as well as a forgotten clown named Raymond Griffith, whose reputation failed to benefit from Kerr's attempt at rehabilitation. One silent clown, however, has been in desperate need of rediscovery since he suffered a catastrophic fall from stardom in 1921. The standard texts on the subject of silent film comedy mention the name Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle only in connection with Chaplin, who worked with him in a handful of Mack Sennett one-reelers in 1914, and Buster Keaton, who first appeared in Arbuckle's films from 1917. For a short time, once he escaped from Sennett, Arbuckle was as popular as Chaplin, writing and directing several films a year. His physical size was matched by his value to producers when Paramount enticed him away from Sennett in 1914 with a $1,000 a day contract and 25% of the profits from his films. He was teamed with Mabel Normand for a string of comedies of which he had total creative control. In 1916 he formed his own company, Comique, and his fame continued to soar. In his two-reeler The Butcher Boy (1917), Arbuckle introduced to the world a Vaudeville performer named Buster Keaton, and when, in 1918, Paramount offered Arbuckle a $3M contract for three feature films, he gave Keaton controlling interest in Comique.

Arbuckle was one of an old tradition of rotund comic figures. Shakespeare's Falstaff is one of the oldest examples, and John Belushi, John Candy, and Chris Farley are a few of the newer ones. Arbuckle was certainly aware that his size had something to do with his fame, but he bristled at being called "Fatty", insisting that "I have a name." But his size would become a part of the undoing of his career, when a false accusation and three outrageous trials, accompanied by a torrent of unsubstantiated gossip, ruined his reputation and convinced the powers in Hollywood to never allow him to work again in front of the camera. A young woman named Virginia Rappe turned up at a party that Arbuckle threw in San Francisco over the Labor Day weekend in 1921, and she died three days later. Evidence from her autopsy suggest that she must've died of peritonitis brought on by a botched abortion. But none of this evidence emerged until much later. Within days of her death, a friend of Rappe went to the police with a manufactured story accusing Arbuckle of raping Rappe. Tabloid news took this slander against Arbuckle and ran with it, and before long they were printing the story that it was Arbuckle's heavy girth that had crushed Rappe, causing the peritonitis by rupturing her internal organs. None of it was true.

Charged with manslaughter, Arbuckle's first two trials ended with hung juries. The third, however, ended with a unanimous verdict of acquittal and an apology from the jury foreman. But the tabloid circus had already done its damage. An enormous moral backlash was sweeping America since the passage in 1920 of the notorious Volstead Act, which brought about the Prohibition era. The intolerable rumors about Arbuckle's wild party, as well as other high profile Hollywood scandals, caused such concern among movie moguls that it led to the formation of the Hays Office, headed by former congressman Will H. Hays, a self-censorship organ that cracked down on sexually explicit and even suggestive content in movies. Despite Arbuckle's vindication, six days later Hays ordered that he be permanently banned from working in the American film industry, and that his previous films should be suppressed. This led to the wholesale destruction of every print of an Arbuckle film that every company and distributor had in their possession. Virtually broke, Arbuckle had already sold his house and automobiles to pay for his legal defense. To help support him, Buster Keaton, who stood by Arbuckle at the risk of own career, signed over 35% of all profits from his own production company. In December 1922, the ban was lifted, but Arbuckle worked thereafter under an assumed name (William Goodrich) and only as a director.

Fortunately for all of us, the effects of the scandal didn't reach Europe, where Arbuckle was still considered the equal of the Big Four and his films were preserved. In Leap Year, completed just prior to that fateful Labor Day weekend in 1921, Arbuckle plays Stanley Piper, nephew of tightwad millionaire Jeremiah Piper, who is in love with the old man's nurse, Phyllis Brown, who has a "sanitary hair-cut" that predates Louise Brooks's by a few years. Jeremiah fires the nurse and sends Stanley to Catalina Island to get him away from women. Of course, Catalina is crawling with women and Stanley, who still wants to marry Phyllis, finds that he has to fight them off.

As played by Arbuckle, Stanley isn't at all like the useless rich guy played by Buster Keaton in The Navigator, who can't even shave himself. Stanley's weaknesses are a stammer that can only be relieved by a drink of water, and women, most of whom find they can't resist him - when they know what he stands to inherit. When three women on Catalina, to whom he turns for love advice, mistake his confidences for marriage proposals, his response is the same: he jumps up and down like he's standing on hot coals and he runs away like Seabiscuit. The film varies his avenues of escape. The first time, he's on a golf course with a tiny black kid as his caddy. When the girl tries to embrace him, he grabs the kid by the hand and makes a mad dash across the green, with the kid hanging on to the golf bag. Mercifully, in mid-course, Stanley stops, grabs the kid, deposits him in the golf bag and drags it the rest of the way to the hotel. On the second occasion, he runs away from another girl straight into the ocean. When he swims past a yacht anchored offshore (his straw hat still affixed to his head), a third girl invites him aboard. When he confesses his love for nurse Phyllis and the girl thinks it's a proposal to her, Stanley dives overboard and swims back toward shore.

Back at Piper Hall, just when the plot begins to grow tedious, Stanley feigns fits to scare away his three fiancées, and Arbuckle gets to show off his skills at physical comedy - pratfalling and back-flipping like a landed fish. But none of his stunts succeed in scaring the girls away. After a climax involving his rejuvenated uncle, his butler becoming a Lord, multiple magistrates, marriage licences, and a chase in and around Piper Hall, all's well when the film ends, with Stanley and Phyllis shaking hands at their engagement.

Leap Year (a meaningless title) isn't up to Arbuckle's best work, which can be seen in his two-reelers like Love and The Hayseed. The problem wasn't Arbuckle but the script, credited to Sarah Y. Mason and Walter Woods. Arbuckle was formerly cast as a working class character, not as a silly heir to a tightwad millionaire. Despite his size, his performance is tightly controlled. Arbuckle's agility - his strength - was remarkable for a man his size. His movements often have the grace of a dancer, and in Sennett's knockabout comedies he became a virtual acrobat, since knowing how to fall was half the battle. But he simply doesn't look at ease in riding boots or golfing togs. And the business of Stanley's stammer (cured with a glass of water) becomes tedious after its third or fourth appearance.

All this is academic, however, when you consider that Leap Year was never released in the U.S. It finally premiered in 1924 - in FINLAND. Considered lost for decades, a print was found in the 1980s and the film was finally given its first American theatrical release in 1981, 60 years after its completion. In the November 1920 issue of Screenland magazine, Arbuckle wrote of his Paramount "five-reelers": "I am satisfied and hope everybody else is satisfied,and that I am on the right track. And I hope the public is going to devour these new five-reelers as a small boy devours jam. They are clean and wholesome, just as my pictures always were. They are made for the whole family - and that's what is needed in these days of the silent drama."(1) A year later, embroiled in a legal fight for his reputation and his freedom, Arbuckle's words perhaps came back to haunt him.


(1) "FROM SLAPSTICK TO LEGIT: Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle tells how it feels to work in Five Reelers," Screenland Magazine, November 1920.