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What to do with short films? Twenty minutes long is sort of cheating to add to the count - but I think I need to keep a note. So volume by volume.
Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Buster Keaton: Complete Shorts 1917-1923 volume 1
The Butcher Boy (1917)
The Rough House (1917)
His Wedding Night (1917)
Oh, Doctor! (1917)
Coney Island (1917)
Out West (1918)
The Bell Boy (1918)
Moonshine (1918)
Of course these are Fatty Arbuckle two-reelers, that happen to feature Buster Keaton. (Arbuckle had been acting in films since 1909, directing since 1914; Keaton like Arbuckle came into films from Vaudeville.) The first few are made in New York, at Talmudge Studios run by Joseph Schenck, and Keaton is very definitely second fiddle - although in The Butcher Boy, the earliest film Keaton appeared in, has him pretty well in character on first appearance, and a wonderful piece of business with brooms followed by getting stuck in molasses. The second reel of the film seems to have little to habve little to do with the first - having seen an early Oliver Hardy short this isn't necessarily unusual.
The other New York films downplay Keaton - mostly he arrives on a bicycle with a stunt. Keaton codirects The Rough House. These aren't quite custard pie fights, but come close and generally see characters throwing objects and food. Arbuckle, meanwhile, gets the girl. There are a couple of moments that play with sexuality - a sequence with a screaming queen and Keaton gets put in a dress - and some moments that border on the racist. Coney Island has more location work and anticipates the Coney Island sequence of Speedy (note also that Arbuckle does a bread roll dance which Chaplin copies in The Gold Rush).
But with Out West, the first of the Hollywood films, the space opens out and we have a western, complete with Indians and Wild Bill Hiccup. Whilst it's not that Arbuckle hasn't been doing stunts prior to this, but here he leaps on and off trains (although the long shot stuff on top of trains is probably animated silohuettes), and is remarkably light on his feet. He's also using split screen and reversing footage. One sequence features Arbuckle cutting someone's hair, first to look like General Grant, then to Abraham Lincoln, and then - but without intertitle - to Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Moonshine, the last of this set, is truncated, surviving only is 35mm fragments; of course a number of other films of the period are thought lost.
Totals: 25 [Cinema: 9; DVD: 15; TV: 1]
Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Buster Keaton: Complete Shorts 1917-1923 volume 1
The Butcher Boy (1917)
The Rough House (1917)
His Wedding Night (1917)
Oh, Doctor! (1917)
Coney Island (1917)
Out West (1918)
The Bell Boy (1918)
Moonshine (1918)
Of course these are Fatty Arbuckle two-reelers, that happen to feature Buster Keaton. (Arbuckle had been acting in films since 1909, directing since 1914; Keaton like Arbuckle came into films from Vaudeville.) The first few are made in New York, at Talmudge Studios run by Joseph Schenck, and Keaton is very definitely second fiddle - although in The Butcher Boy, the earliest film Keaton appeared in, has him pretty well in character on first appearance, and a wonderful piece of business with brooms followed by getting stuck in molasses. The second reel of the film seems to have little to habve little to do with the first - having seen an early Oliver Hardy short this isn't necessarily unusual.
The other New York films downplay Keaton - mostly he arrives on a bicycle with a stunt. Keaton codirects The Rough House. These aren't quite custard pie fights, but come close and generally see characters throwing objects and food. Arbuckle, meanwhile, gets the girl. There are a couple of moments that play with sexuality - a sequence with a screaming queen and Keaton gets put in a dress - and some moments that border on the racist. Coney Island has more location work and anticipates the Coney Island sequence of Speedy (note also that Arbuckle does a bread roll dance which Chaplin copies in The Gold Rush).
But with Out West, the first of the Hollywood films, the space opens out and we have a western, complete with Indians and Wild Bill Hiccup. Whilst it's not that Arbuckle hasn't been doing stunts prior to this, but here he leaps on and off trains (although the long shot stuff on top of trains is probably animated silohuettes), and is remarkably light on his feet. He's also using split screen and reversing footage. One sequence features Arbuckle cutting someone's hair, first to look like General Grant, then to Abraham Lincoln, and then - but without intertitle - to Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Moonshine, the last of this set, is truncated, surviving only is 35mm fragments; of course a number of other films of the period are thought lost.
Totals: 25 [Cinema: 9; DVD: 15; TV: 1]
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