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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
Coney Island is a quick churn out with thirty minutes of standard slapstick and pratfalls featuring silent giants Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton. Arbuckle was the biggest (figuratively speaking) thing in silents at the time save Charlie Chaplin and its easy to see how this self effacing big kid with a sweet face to match must have regaled the audiences of his day.
In Coney Island he plays a bored husband at the beach and though susceptible to adultery and forced to don female attire and hang out in the ladies dressing room Fatty easily sanitizes the whole situation with his cherubic arrested development.
Buster Keaton plays a supporting role that offers more than the stone face he would maintain in his prime and while the injury producing stunts are well in evidence it's unpleasantly out of character to see Buster busting a gut laughing or breaking into tears. Al St. John matches Buster in pratfalls and Alice Neilson as Fatty's wife is comically and forcefully shrewish but Coney Island is little more than a basic Keystone Cops two reeler filled with the obligatory orgy of people falling down and being batted about the face an head.