The Cook
and Other Treasures
(1917-1920)
on
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Contents: A Reckless Romeo (1917), The Cook (1918), Number, Please? (1920).
In The Cook (1918), Roscoe and Buster work in a beachfront cafe. As the cook, Arbuckle has several opportunities to show off his juggling expertise. Buster is a waiter that causes trouble for the fretting owner, and does a hilarious Egyptian dance, which Roscoe joins in on. When a tough guy disrupts the cafe, Luke the dog gives him a run for his money. At lunch, the restaurant crew shows us a number of different and funny ways to eat spaghetti.
The second half of the film follows Roscoe and Buster on their day off fishing and courting at a waterfront amusement park. The tough guy shows up again to cause trouble, only to be thwarted again by Luke.
Presumed lost, fragmentary prints of The Cook were recovered in 1998 by the Norsk Filminstitutt and 2002 by the Nederlands Filmmuseum to give us a fairly complete representation of the original film. Preservation of the footage was undertaken by the George Eastman House film archive.
In A Reckless Romeo (1917), a drunken Roscoe comes home at 3:00 AM to his wife’s ire. The next day, he goes for a trip to an amusement park with his steaming wife and mother-in-law. Roscoe draws the wrath of a jealous boyfriend (Al St. John) when he flirts with the wrong pretty girl. The flirting and the resulting fight is captured on film by a passing newsreel photographer, only to be seen by Roscoe, his wife, his mother-in-law, and the jealous boyfriend at the movie theater the next day! Another film that had been presumed lost, A Reckless Romeo was recovered by the Norsk Filminstitutt in the late 1990s.
Harold Lloyd stars in Number, Please? as a young man who is vying against Roy Brooks for the attentions of Mildred Davis. When her dog gets away from her at an amusement park, Harold and Roy try to be its chivalrous rescuers. When Mildred wants to take a hot-air balloon ride, both of them vie to be the first to get permission from Mildred’s mother: Roy by running to her house, Harold by trying to get through to her at a bank of busy payphones. The remainder of the film involves a stolen purse.
From a documentary perspective, all three films offer us some excellent views of amusement parks of the late 1910s: California’s Luna Park in The Cook, Palisades Park in Fort Lee, New Jersey, in A Reckless Romeo, and another California park (Ocean Park) in Number, Please? — amusement park historians, take note! — Carl Bennett
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 2003 Milestone Film & Video edition
The Cook and Other Treasures (1917-1920), color-toned black & white and black & white, 70 minutes, not rated.
Milestone Film & Video, ID1035MLSDVD, UPC 0-14381-10352-6.
Full-frame 4:3 NTSC, one single-sided, single-layered DVD disc, Region 1, 5 Mbps average video bit rate, 224 kbps audio bit rate, Dolby Digital stereo sound, English intertitles, no foreign language subtitles, chapter stops, keep case, $24.99.
DVD release date: 11 February 2003.
Country of origin: USA
Ratings (1-10): video: 8 / audio: 8 / additional content: 8 / overall: 8. |
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While Buster Keaton does not appear in A Reckless Romeo, this volume of two short Roscoe Arbuckle films, offered with a Harold Lloyd short, makes a good companion volume to Kino International’s Arbuckle & Keaton collections. Here are further examples of Arbuckle’s talent as a film comedian.
This presentation of The Cook has been assembled from two very-good 35mm nitrate prints that are compromised by a moderate amount of dust, speckling, scratches, and emulsion damage. The tonal ranges vary slightly from broad to slightly darker, and image detail is generally very-good to excellent. The video transfers have been made from one black & white print and one color-toned print. The black & white footage has been electronically color-toned to approximately match (but is still slightly lighter than) its supporting footage. Either the video transfer or the Norsk Filminstitutt source print is slightly tighter framed than the Nederlands Filmmuseum footage, which is apparent when a single shot has been reconstructed using footage from both prints. Also some of the Norsk footage is cropped tightly enough to lessen the impact of some of the gags when comic business occurs too closely to the edge of the frame. While the film is largely complete, there are fragments that are missing throughout the reconstruction print, including the ending.
In a silent film DVD supplements first, Milestone Film & Video has included video transfers of both the fragmented Norsk and Nederlands prints that can be edited together on a PC equipped with a DVD drive and appropriate video-editing software. To assist the would-be reconstructionist, a PDF file of the The Cook’s original press kit has been provided as a guide to the original film’s continuity.
The presentation of A Reckless Romeo sources from the sole known surviving print held by the Norsk Filminstitutt, a very-good 35mm positive that is moderately speckled and dusty, lightly scratched, and moderately but consistently scuffed, with a persistent and sometimes distracting case of frame jitters early in the film. The tonal range of this color-toned presentation is generally a smidge less than excellent, as is the image detail.
The source print for the video transfer of Number, Please? is an excellent 35mm print provided by LarCas Productions that is spotted with a light amount of speckling, scuffing, and very light vertical scratches. Only the intertitles appear to be more speckled than the main footage. The grayscale range and image detail of the print is excellent, and the picture is generously framed. Number, Please? is the best-looking film of the three on the disc.
The films are accompanied by piano scores composed and performed by Philip Carli, one of the best of the current practitioners of silent film accompaniment. The stereo recording is well reproduced here.
USA: Click the logomark at right to purchase
a Region 1 NTSC DVD of this edition from Amazon.com. |
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Canada: Click the logomark at right to purchase
a Region 1 NTSC DVD of this edition from Amazon.ca. |
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