Silent era Hollywood had more than its share of notorious scandals: the mysterious death of producer-director Thomas Ince, the as-yet unsolved murder of director William Desmond Taylor, the drug addiction and early death of actor Wallace Reid, and several scandals involving comedy star Mabel Normand. Yet none was more shocking or more widely discussed than the tragedy of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle.

A performer since the age of 8, the portly Arbuckle began working for Mack Sennett in 1913 and quickly became one of the era's biggest comedy stars, appearing with such greats as Charles Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Mabel Normand. It was a strong measure of his success and clout in Hollywood that he was the first movie star in America to regularly direct his own films, taking the lead both in front of and behind the camera from 1914 onward. By 1920, he had moved from shorts to full-length features and found great success with such films as Brewster's Millions (1921) and Gasoline Gus (1921).

To celebrate signing a three-year contract with Paramount for an unprecedented $1 million in the late summer of 1921, Arbuckle and a few friends drove up to San Francisco for a weekend of partying at the fashionable St. Francis Hotel. In the course of the revels, a young starlet named Virginia Rappe fell ill in Arbuckle's room and three days later died of peritonitis caused by a ruptured bladder. Based on some dubious testimony, Arbuckle was arrested in connection with her death and it was claimed that her injuries were the result of being raped by the overweight comic. The press had a field day with the story, particularly the San Francisco Examiner whose publisher, William Randolph Hearst, boasted that the Arbuckle scandal (the media's own creation) had sold more papers than the sinking of the Lusitania.

After three trials over the course of five months, Arbuckle was not only acquitted but received an apology from the last jury for the "great injustice" done to him. But it was too late. Public reaction, fueled by yellow journalism, was fiercely against him. In response to the scandal (as well as the murder of Arbuckle's friend William Desmond Taylor and the lurid stories that surfaced in its wake), the film industry sought to ease growing anti-Hollywood sentiments and forestall threats of government action by setting up the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association, a self-policing, self-censorship organization headed by Will Hays, the former U.S. Postmaster General. One of Hays's first actions was to ban Arbuckle from movies in April 1922, just days after his acquittal. The ban was lifted in December of that year, but the damage had been done.

Arbuckle could not get hired in movies, so he returned to stage work, where his appearances were often met with protests from citizens groups. Arbuckle's good friend Buster Keaton did his best to help him, both monetarily (Arbuckle had gone through a fortune fighting the charges) and professionally, hiring him to write some of his pictures and even direct Sherlock Jr. (1924), a production the broken and increasingly alcoholic Arbuckle was never able to work on. Not long after, he did manage to find work as a director. His first break came, ironically, making shorts starring his own nephew Al St. John, who had played foil to his uncle and other stars in his early career and was now a comedy star in his own right. St. John himself and later Grover Jones got the credit for these pictures at first. Eventually, Arbuckle's new pseudonym, William Goodrich began to appear in the credits. Under this name, he directed Fool's Luck (1926).

The picture was ninth of the nearly 50 comic shorts Arbuckle directed under the Goodrich name between 1924 and 1932, many of them starring his nephew as well as another important comic actor of the time, mostly forgotten today, Lloyd Hamilton. He also made a handful of films with Lupino Lane, the former British music hall star and cousin of actor Stanley Lupino, father of Ida Lupino. Lane was wonderfully adept at physical comedy, a skill Fool's Luck makes good use of. Audiences didn't seem to mind that the comedy short borrowed some sight gags from earlier films, notably a scene in which Lane is oblivious to the fact that the driver has fallen out of the moving vehicle in which he's riding, a scene similar to one in Keaton's Sherlock Jr.. (The cinematographer on Fool's Luck, Byron Houck, had also shot the earlier film, as well as Keaton's The Navigator, 1924.)

Lane plays "The Dude," a character name he used before (and no apparent relation to Jeff Bridges's role in The Big Lebowski, 1998), in the Arbuckle-directed The Fighting Dude (1925). The idle young gentleman lives the high life in an expensive apartment with a butler and maid, thanks to the largesse of his wealthy uncle. On the day his fiancée and her father are coming to dinner, The Dude learns he has not only been cut off from his financial support but evicted from his flat. The situation gives rise to a number of great comic bits.

Fool's Luck was produced by Educational Pictures, a company established in 1915 to produce and distribute classroom films. Founder E.W. Hammons soon branched out into making short comedies, and the studio would turn out hundreds of shorts until it folded in 1939.

Arbuckle continued to direct for Educational and other companies under the Goodrich name, and even got the opportunity to make a feature starring Marion Davies, ironically, the mistress of William Randolph Hearst. He was finally allowed back on screen in 1932 after signing a contract to make comedy shorts for Warner Brothers out of their Vitaphone studio in New York. The following year, thanks to the success of the shorts, Warners signed him to make a feature. The same night he signed the contract, he suffered a heart attack and died in his sleep.

Director: Roscoe Arbuckle, as William Goodrich
Producer/Presenter: E.W. Hammons
Screenplay: Roscoe Arbuckle
Cinematography: Byron Houck
Cast: Lupino Lane (The Dude), George Davis (Valet), Virginia Vance (Girl), Jack Lloyd (Father).
BW-15m.

by Rob Nixon