Buster Keaton

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The Garage

The Garage was Buster's fourteenth and last short with Roscoe Arbuckle, released about four months after Back Stage. Like many of Arbuckle's two-reelers, it consists of two mostly disconnected halves. Fatty and Buster work in a garage owned by Rube (Daniel Crimmins) in the first half, and the garage is also a firehouse staffed by Fatty and Buster in the second half. Most of it is not particularly funny, but it has some wonderful physical comedy, mostly involving Buster. Fatty takes a nice fall too (2:10), but his character is undeveloped. The love interest, Rube's daughter Molly (Molly Malone), relates to neither Fatty nor Buster.

Borrowing a gag used by Buster in The Bell Boy, The Garage opens with Fatty polishing the window of a car, which Fatty then reaches through to show it does not exist (0:25). Soon he and Buster are throwing wet rags, buckets of water, pies, and tires at one another (2:00), resulting in predictable pratfalls. Their use of a large motorized turntable to wash and dry a car (4:00) is not particularly funny, but it establishes the prop for later. After Fatty walks on the rotating turntable (8:50), Buster performs a spectacular sequence on it: somersault, backflip, backflip/roll off turntable into wall, back onto turntable for another somersault and backflip, finally running on the turntable until Fatty tackles him (9:00).

Too much of The Garage is uninspired: a rented car falls apart as soon as it leaves the garage (4:30), oil from a car covers Molly and her beau (6:45), a fake mad dog is chased with large nets (10:00), a fire starts in the garage/firehouse (15:30) leading to silly business with a leaky hose (16:00), and Molly bounces atop telephone wires (17:30). Firemen Buster and Fatty set up an elaborate mechanical rope and pulley system to remove their bedclothes and nightshirts when a firebell rings (14:00), but the gag feels forced, less amusing than Buster moments earlier acrobatically pulling himself up the firepole upside down (13:40). One odd cinematic moment is reminiscent of the breaking of the fourth wall in Fatty's early shorts: when Fatty's face gets smeared with oil, Buster leads him right up to the camera before he wipes him off (6:15).

Buster gets stuck in a fence during the mad dog chase and the dog bites the seat of Buster's pants (10:45). Pantless Buster dons a barrel, but the barrel breaks, leaving a passing lady aghast, and she brings in a cop. Buster dons a paper kilt and tam cut from a poster to convince the cop he's a kilted scot, but then spins around to reveal no pants under his 2D kilt. Fatty rescues Buster from the persuing cop with their best joint moment: Buster walks very close behind Fatty in step with him (12:25), then Fatty performs a perfectly executed sidestep and spin to move behind Buster. Finally, Buster grabs a pair of pants while passing a store, and when Fatty lifts him as they walk he puts them on without pausing.


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