As Keystone comedies go, this is a pretty dark and depressing little piece of work. There's an amusing moment or two along the way, thanks largely to Roscoe Arbuckle's physical dexterity, but the story is more harrowing than funny, with an ending that's like something out of Kafka. And if you know the details of Arbuckle's tragic life and career the distressing impact of FATTY JOINS THE FORCE is only compounded.<br /><br />The story gets under way in a park. Fatty and his wife encounter cop Edgar Kennedy, who apparently tosses off a sassy remark (about Roscoe's girth?) en route to a flirtation with a nursemaid. While the cop and the maid are chatting, the nurse's charge, a little girl, wanders off and then falls into the lake. Fatty comes to the rescue and saves the little girl, who turns out to be the Police Commissioner's daughter. Fatty the hero is 'rewarded' with a position on the police force, but quickly gets into trouble. He falls afoul of a group of teenage boys who easily get the better of him. By the end, due to a misunderstanding, the one-time hero is mistaken for a dangerous "wild man," and winds up in jail himself, disgraced and sobbing with frustration while his wife flirts with the Police Commissioner.<br /><br />How funny does that sound? . . . Not so funny, right? And when you consider that Arbuckle himself plummeted from a position of wealth and celebrity to genuine and lasting disgrace, due, according to the most credible research, to a tragic misunderstanding, the weepy close-up of Roscoe in his jail cell that concludes this film is even more disturbing than it might otherwise be. History buffs will be reminded of the infamous composite photo that ran in the Hearst papers at the height of the Arbuckle scandal in 1921, showing a grim-faced Roscoe supposedly behind bars in San Francisco, facing rape and manslaughter charges. (The charges were real, all right, but the photo was faked.) Even taken on its own terms, FATTY JOINS THE FORCE is short on laughs. Roscoe executes a couple of funny falls, and reacts strenuously to a pie in the face, but otherwise this movie is about as comical as Hitchcock's THE WRONG MAN.