Buzzin' Around

A short that I recorded from the Saturday matinee block on TCM as opposed to it randomly showing up after some movie to fill out a time slot was one from the end of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's life when he signed a contract to make shorts at Vitaphone to be distributed by Warner Bros. That movie is Buzzin' Around.

Arbuckle plays Cornelius, a rural inventor who has been working on a formula for a coating that, if applied to china, will render it shatter-resistant, as shown in a sight gag of dropping a pitcher and having it bounce, not just land without breaking. He's just received a letter from a china-shop owner who seems interested in the idea, and would like him to come and give a demonstration. However, in a mix-up, Cornelius takes a jug of moonshine that his friend Al (Al St. John) likes to drink from.

Not that Cornelius is going to be able to get to the china shop anyway. The title of the short comes from a scene early in the film when a beehive falls into the back of Cornelius' car as he's about to set off for the city and the china shop, with Cornelius swallowing one of the bees. But that's by far not the only issue Cornelius faces. There's a sight gag involving parallel parking, along with Cornelius' fender getting caught up with the fender of a much nicer car. This latter incident leads to a dispute that continually escalates until a policeman gets involved, with Cornelius finding a way out of it.

Eventually, Cornelius does make it to the shop, and of course his formula doesn't work considering that he doesn't have the formula with him and his friend Al is trying to get it to the shop before Cornelius can do any damage. And then the owner of the shop who was the one who wrote the letter shows up, revealing one last joke....

Fatty Arbuckle's career had, of couse, been destroyed a decade earlier by the incident where actress Virginia Rappe died in a hotel room he was renting, and his subsequent trials for his responsibility in her death. What a short like Buzzin' Around reveals is that Arbuckle's style of comedy had clearly gone out of fashion in the intervening decade. The comedy is way too broad and not particularly funny. This short was released in early 1933 and later in the year Arbuckly would suffer a fatal heart attack. But in any case, I don't know that he would have had a successful revival if he kept making shorts like this one.