Arbuckle made his film debut in 1909, signing with the Selig Polyscope Company, where he appeared in five short comedies (all of one reel or less). After a brief stint at Nestor Comedies, in 1913 he made the career-changing move of signing with comedy great Mack Sennett's Keystone Film Company. Arbuckle was to remain with Sennett through 1917, during which time he became one of the most popular comic stars in films. He also began directing many of his own shorts.
Running from one-half to two reels, Arbuckle's films appealed to children and adults alike, with their mixture of broad slapstick, pie-throwing, and gentle humor. Even the lewdest jokes seemed harmless coming from the comic, who looked like a huge baby. Enormously obese and equally graceful, Arbuckle had soft, genial features, blond hair, and blue eyes, qualities that, added to his talent, helped make him one of the more endearing of Sennett's stock company. Joining him in these films were costars such as his nephew, Al "Fuzzy" St. John; newcomer Charlie Chaplin; Arbuckle's first wife, Minta Durfee; and Mabel Normand. Arbuckle and Normand made a particularly good team, their pairing, in short films such as Fatty's Flirtation (1913), Mabel and Fatty's Married Life (1915), and Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916), resulting in a deeper byplay than was usual in Sennett comedies.
In 1917 Arbuckle left Sennett and signed with the producers Joseph Schenck and Adolph Zukor at Paramount Pictures. He made 21 two-reel comedies through 1920, introducing into films his friend Buster Keaton, who appeared in 15 Arbuckle shorts -the first being The Butcher Boy (1917)- before branching out on his own. With his growing popularity, in 1920 Arbuckle was signed up for a series of full-length features by Famous Players-Lasky (to be released through Paramount). He made nine features in 1920 and 1921, beginning with The Round-Up. He starred in one of many versions of Brewster's Millions as well as Gasoline Gus, as a village rube; Life of the Party, as an attorney; and Leap Year, as an heir in love with a poor nurse.
Disaster struck on Labor Day weekend 1921, when Arbuckle cohosted a party at San Francisco's St. Francis hotel with the directors Lowell Sherman and Fred Fischbach. One of the guests was Virginia Rappe, a promising young starlet who had gained excellent press notices in films such as Paradise Garden (1917), A Twilight Baby (1920), and An Adventuress (1922). She was also reported to be engaged to the director Henry Lehrman. Rappe took ill during the party, and she was treated by the hotel doctor Arthur Beardsley but not taken to a hospital for several days. She died on September 9, and Arbuckle was indicted for murder. Unfounded press rumors that he had crushed Rappe while raping her essentially killed his acting career. Paramount dropped him, and his films already in release were banned. Rappe, too, was smeared by innuendo, with Arbuckle's partisans claiming that she had died from alcoholism or venereal disease. In fact, a 2000 investigation and examination of Rappe's autopsy report and medical records showed that she actually died from a ruptured bladder, due to an untreated urinary tract infection. Arbuckle was finally acquitted in 1922 but was left broke and with his reputation in tatters.
Arbuckle's career as a big-studio star may have been over, but in fact he never stopped working. In early 1923 the low-budget Educational Studios hired him to write, produce, and direct comedies. For the next nine years he was a regular employee at Educational, both under his own name and as "William Goodrich" (never Will B. Good, as rumor had it). He was responsible for a total of 52 one- and two-reel comedies, and in 1930 he broke into talking pictures, directing the Educational two-reeler Won by a Neck.
Educational was not Arbuckle's only employer at this time. He also had an unbilled cameo in Buster Keaton's Go West (1925), and in 1927 he codirected, with King Vidor, the Marion Davies feature The Red Mill for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Arbuckle returned to Paramount to direct the Eddie Cantor comedy Special Delivery (1927), and from 1930 to 1932 he wrote and directed a number of RKO talking comedies.
Arbuckle had not been seen on-screen in nearly a decade when Jack Warner signed him to star in a series of two-reel comedies for Vitaphone in Brooklyn, directed by Alf Goulding or Ray McCarey. A total of six were produced in 1932 and 1933, and they showed that Arbuckle's voice "photographed" well and that he had retained his comic talents. He completed shooting In the Dough with McCarey on June 29, 1933, and that night died in his sleep of a heart attack in New York City.
Unlike the reputations of his costars Chaplin and Keaton, that of Arbuckle has languished, and for decades he has been better known for the scandal and subsequent trial than for his career. That may change, however, with the 2005 release of the digital video disc (DVD) set The Forgotten Films of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. The four DVDs contain 32 restored Arbuckle comedies, which he appears in or directed; other stars featured in the silent and sound films are Chaplin, Keaton, Normand, Harold Lloyd, and Douglas Fairbanks.
