weezeralfalfa Review of The Bell Boy

The Bell Boy (1918)

Good comedy by Roscoe, Buster, Al, Alice, and others.

[9/10 · 20 August 2018]

Just the year before(1917), Roscoe(he hated being called Fatty) Arbuckle was introduced to veteran vaudeville performer Buster Keaton, who was invited to do a series of mostly 2 reel comedy shorts. Thus, was born perhaps the first famous 2 man comedy team, in which one was fat, and the other skinny or normal. Other examples through the years include Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and Jacky Gleason with Art Carney. Al St. John was also a fixture in these films. With the dawn of talkies, he switched to westerns, eventually becoming Fuzzy: comical sidekick to a number of western heroes, such as Buster Crabb. ......As the bell boys, of coarse, Roscoe and Buster created mayhem in the lobby of the Elkhead Lodge. Roscoe was also the lodge barber. He got a terrifying-looking tall bewhiskered man. First, he made him look like General Grant, then like Abe Lincoln, giving them appropriate hats to heighten the illusion.. .....I especially liked the elevator scene. The elevator moves up and down via a rope tied to a horse. Keaton somehow got his neck caught between the elevator floor and the wall. The horse refuses to budge backwards, so the horseman builds a little fire under the horse. But it only succeeds in burning the rope, causing the elevator to descend with a jolt. This gets Keaton out of his predicament, but Alice was standing on a board partly in the elevator shaft. With the elevator pushing the other end down, Alice was launched up to the mascot elkhead, getting stuck in it's antlers. Keaton went about trying to get her down, and wound up in a predicament, himself......At a dance party, Roscoe has Keaton and Al dress up as robbers. They sneak in the nearby bank, but it's already occupied by real robbers. The 2 groups don't get along. The boys escape through a series of high jumps, but the robbers catch up, and we have a slapstick free for all, until the robbers escape onto a horse-drawn trolley, and go up a steep hill. Somehow, the horse becomes detached, and they go speeding down the hill, running off the end of the track, into the Elkhead Lodge, where another fight ensues.......42 years later Jerry Lewis would make a film also called The Bellhop.......See it at YouTube, or on commercial DVDs