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Title: Coney Island (1917)
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Storyline
A rotund young man and his wife are spending the day at the beach at Coney Island. Feeling restless and wanting to go to the amusements at Luna Park, he ditches his wife. At the amusement park, he meets a pretty young woman. She arrived at the amusement park with one man, went in with another who had money to pay her entrance, before she ends up spending much of the day with the rotund husband, who managed to get the second man arrested. As the husband and the pretty young woman get into one misadventure after another, the first two men try to win back the affection of the pretty young woman, while the wife goes searching for her husband. The wife and the second man, who are old friends, team up in their quest, which leads to further misadventure for all five and the police. Written by Huggo
The review by wmorrow59 on these pages gives you a great deal of the plot, so I won't repeat that here. I only wish to comment that this is probably the most frenetic of the Keaton/Arbuckle shorts and comes quite early in their work together, being only their fifth pairing. In its KINO VHS/DVD incarnation - Arbuckle and Keaton, Volume 2 - it is given the year 1918, while the IMDb lists it as 1917.
Good bits here are:
Arbuckle burying himself in the sand to avoid his harridan wife; Fatty addressing the camera and asking it to raise itself to his chest level while he undresses in the beach changing room; Fatty leaving his wife in jail with the knocked out cops at the end.
After a slow start this is pure mayhem. Once again Fatty is in drag, pretending to be a girl - but this time to no reason. It's only the unavailability of a male's swim suit that propels him to don a woman's garb.
Watching Al St. John flirt with Arbuckle, thinking him a woman, is a treat.
Their water fight is fun, especially Arbuckle's agile dolphin-style swim.
The print used in the KINO edition is crisp and clear but not in good shape - many scratches and other wear are evident. The Alloy Orchestra once again provides terrible accompaniment.
This is true slapstick from beginning to end.