Fatty's Tintype Tangle

Once this Keystone comedy finishes with the setup and gets going, it has some very good sequences with some good laughs. Roscoe Arbuckle is good throughout, and once Louise Fazenda and Edgar Kennedy arrive on the scene, the three of them work well together in performing the comic routines and in keeping up a manic pace.

The first several minutes focus on the home life of Arbuckle's henpecked husband character, who is particularly tormented by his mother-in-law. It makes the point quickly, and probably then spends too much time driving the point home. For the most part, the only things that work well in this stretch of the movie are Arbuckle's occasional gags with his hat and other props. Otherwise, scaling this sequence down to just a minute or two would have been more than adequate to set up the rest of it.

Once Arbuckle storms out of the house and gets involved with another couple played by Fazenda and Kennedy, it picks up considerably. Things start with a chance photograph that puts Arbuckle and Fazenda in an apparently compromising position, and for the rest of the time the movie just keeps building onto this setup, getting quite a bit out of this plus a couple of added plot devices.

The three stars play their parts well, with Arbuckle as the harried and desperate man wrongly accused, Kennedy as the angry, jealous husband, and Fazenda as the panic-stricken wife trying desperately to help. Their escapades make use of a variety of settings and props. The last half of the movie is pretty good, and it's worth waiting for a few minutes to get to it.