Belittled and large: In the cinema, fat men often have a thin time. As John Goodman puts the stones in 'The Flintstones', Quentin Curtis tells their story, from 'Fatty' Arbuckle to John Candy

Falstaff: . . . banish plump Jack and banish all the world.

Prince: I do, I will.

'Chimes at Midnight'

EXCESS has always been at the heart of the movies. They are not so much interested in life as in larger-than-life. The process of projection itself is the gigantic magnification of an image 35 millimetres in width, so that stars, before being cut down to size by video, tower over us in the stalls. In real life, movie actors seem smaller, slighter. This month's Empire magazine presents a spread of Hollywood favourites and their heights. How are the mighty shrunken. Tom Cruise turns out to be 5ft 9in; Al Pacino almost a dwarf at 5ft 6in; Danny DeVito, actually a dwarf at 5ft nothing. Perhaps, then, it's no wonder that the truly large have never been properly accommodated by the movies. Lonely behemoths, they amount to a brigade so heavy that they have been marginalised, banished to a cameo corner, lest they obliterate the screen.

Take John Goodman. This month it may be hard to leave him. He plays Fred Flintstone in the summer's box-office giant (whatever any of us think about it), The Flintstones. A big break for a fine actor, you may say. More like a familiar break for a big actor. The Flintstones is the sort of shoddy vehicle that has traditionally been steered by a fat man. Goodman plays a blundering dunderhead, a moral myopic unable to see beyond the next meal. He banters and bellows, rails at his mother-in-law, and gets pinioned to the floor by a dinosaur. Of course, he has the last laugh. But not before we've had plenty (or are meant to have had) at him.

Goodman has had the classic fat man's career, bouncing between buffoons (King Ralph, Matinee), psychopaths (The Big Easy, Barton Fink) and sidekicks (Everybody's All American, and the role he made his name with, Dan Conner, husband of Roseanne). Within these limits, he has shown himself to be a superb performer - as in his frightening-funny whiplash between bonhomie and mania in Barton Fink. Could his typecasting have anything to do with the fact that he is pushing 20 stone?

A word on weight. It's hard to be precise about the poundage of this piece's heroes. It's not that they're too horrific, but too fluctuating. Most fat actors lurch between frantic dieting and surreptitious bingeing. John Belushi's penchant for midnight meals was such that directors struggled to preserve continuity in his bodily appearance. He might balloon or deflate in the course of a film. That is why biographers hedge about their subjects' bulk. It is difficult to be exact beyond dinner-time. The figure might then be affected by the small matter of a bottle of Moet et Chandon, boudin noir aux pommes, terrine de canard, a bottle of Beaujolais, a huge porterhouse steak, mousse

a l'Armagnac, five Calvadoses, and several coffees - Orson Welles's idea of a decent dinner. If in doubt, revise upwards.

THE FAT man, pratfalling and fooling, is as old as cinema itself. The comedians of the American, French and Russian cinema of the early 1900s were often ex-clowns: men such as the great Russian V Avdeyev, creator of the fat bourgeois figure Djadja Pud, whose obesity left him always a step behind the world; or the bumptious, bewhiskered Jack Bunny, every bit as hen-pecked as Fred Flintstone. But it was the Keystone comedy of Mack Sennett, with its colourful caricatures, that put fat men on the map. That and the greatest scandal in cinema history.

The rise and fall of former Keystone Cop Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle fleshily embodies the fat man's perennial predicament. His obesity was both his making and his breaking. There is no doubt that part of his appeal lay in the comic incongruity between his vast body (he weighed 15 stone at the age of 13, and anything between 19 and 27 stone later) and the odd daintiness and dexterity of his movements - what James Agee described as 'his silky manipulation of his bulk and his satanic marksmanship with pies'. By and large the fat men of the movies have been surprisingly light on their feet.

But when scandal broke in September 1929, over the rape and murder of starlet Virginia Rappe in the St Francis Hotel, San Francisco, at a party attended by Arbuckle, the weight weighed against him. The affectionate nicknames - 'The Balloonatic', 'The Prince of Whales' - turned into barbs. He stood trial three times, before finally being acquitted. Did the public tie the crime to his bulk, as if his size must betray a gargantuan appetite that extended to sex? Surely, some such thought process was going through the mind of Attorney Earl Rogers, when he stated: 'Arbuckle's weight will damn him. He will no longer be a roly-poly, good-natured comedian. He will be a monster. If he were an ordinary man his spotless reputation would save him. But he is not. He is Roscoe Arbuckle. They'll never convict him, but this will ruin him and maybe motion pictures for some time. God help us all.'

A man who literally stepped into Arbuckle's boots was Charlie Chaplin, who one day borrowed Arbuckle's tent-like trousers and outsize shoes and made his own history. The Little Tramp does not concern us here. But in his early films there is a towering figure who does: Eric Campbell. Six foot four and nearly 20 stone, Campbell was the first of a breed of Goliaths who became the villains of silent comedy. With his devilishly arched eyebrows, heavily shadowed eyes, and a belt round his waist like a strap round a barrel, he was there to be humiliated by Charlie. Just in the course of the Unknown Chaplin (Academy Video) we see him clocked over the head, stuffed in a well, dropped on a stretcher into the sea, and having every inch of his massive frame spattered by custard-pie. A notoriously racy driver, Campbell died in a car-crash in 1917. Without Campbell's bulk to balk at, Chaplin slipped into his routine of coy and cuddly self-pity, never to be so good a comic again.

Oliver Hardy, before he teamed up with Stan Laurel, played roles in the Eric Campbell mould. With Hardy, the career pattern of the fat man, of belittlement for being large, begins to set. Look at early photographs of him and you don't see a fat man at all. The frowning weather-beaten face of 1925, with its full, assertive moustache not yet foreshortened into that clipped badge of absurdity, might be that of the young Ernest Hemingway. Between, say, The Music Box (1932), and Way Out West (1937), Hardy swells from stoutness to obesity, the face losing all definition, inflated into a medicine ball, the eyes like narrow slits for laces. Perhaps, by then, the thanklessness of his comic persona had dawned on him. Well might he have sought solace in food and drink, as his self-image dwindled and he was left playing a fat fool - clumsy, stupid, hot-tempered, and hypocritical (tetchily dismissive of Stan, but unctuously polite to outsiders: 'Why, thank you, Ma'am').

Hardy hated being fat. His wife, Lucille, wrote to his biographer of his 'inner feeling of inferiority and confusion'. It is well known that Stan Laurel was the creative half of the team, setting up gags while Hardy played golf. But it's impossible to say what comic refinements were lost to the partnership through this division of duties. Hardy might have curbed the excesses of the later films: they became as unwieldy and bloated as his own body. He might have saved the duo from complacency. Instead, he was allowed to wallow unhappily in his image of himself as fat and useless.

He was, after all, funny not because he was fat, but because he was a comic genius: a master of timing, of dummying the audience into relaxation, before taking a hit; and the creator of a character whose real humour lay as much in its exaggerated courtesy and inarticulate exasperation as its humiliations.

Though the movies have never realised it, it's talent, not weight, that makes fat men funny. Sheer mass on screen is not humorous. Hemmed within the dull limits of corporeality, film can never be as funny about fatness as literature. There is no fat man on film as funny as Dickens's Pickwick. Nor could the cinema ever match Martin Amis's Whitehead pere in Dead Babies: 'Whitehead Sr . . . is a fabulously obese human being, better than 35 stone. As he trundles down the street school-parties are floored by his myriad stray fists of flab; bus platforms snap off should he climb on board; lifts whinny, shudder and stay where they are when he presses the UP button and plummet terrifyingly whether or not he is so foolish as to depress the DOWN; chairs splinter beneath him; tables somersault at a touch from his elbow; joists crack and floorboards powder.'

OUTSIDE of cartoons, film cannot compete with that sort of comic exaggeration. But this is no excuse for its craven lack of variety in portraying fat men. Where are the virtuous? The best example is Orson Welles's Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight. Welles, as he told Peter Bogdanovich in their book, This is Orson Welles, believed that Falstaff was 'one of the only great characters in all dramatic literature who is essentially good . . . The comedy is all about the gross faults in the man, but those faults are so trivial: his famous cowardice is a joke - a joke Falstaff seems to be telling himself against himself; a strong case could be made for his courage. But his goodness is basic - like bread and wine. He's just shining with love; he asks for so little, and in the end, of course, he gets nothing.'

Who could miss the plaintive note of autobiography, and of self-justification? Welles, the Lord of Life, was feted and rejected. His faults were trivial, next to his virtues: the cowardice he showed in never daring to finish a film was as nothing to the courage involved in always staking new ground and standing up to the studios. And even his darkest roles are underlit by a flicker of goodness, redeeming the most compromised of villains. He was taunted for cruelty by the critic Pauline Kael, but she was mistaking sportiveness for malignity.

Welles was always large: at 13, over 6ft and 13 stone; later, up to 19 stone, with a 56-inch waist. But in his early years he pulled off an illusion of svelteness. Though it required dieting and corsets, his young Kane is as sleek and streamlined as a child's sledge. But inside the thin man there was a fat man waiting to get out. For a long time, the pleasure of eating outweighed the pain of the fat jokes. Indeed, Welles used to tell one rather good one against himself, about turning up to a party in the grotesque padding and make-up of his hulkish Hank Quinlan, while filming Touch of Evil, and being told by all and sundry how great he looked. That he turned from such levity to despair about his weight - even considering having the fat cut off by a London plastic surgeon - is a measure of his Falstaffian sense of rejection. The world that he expected to share his love of life, despised it. His body became cruelly confused with his body of work, his rotundity with orotundity, his films wrongly perceived as over-inflated and self-indulgent.

That other great fat director, Alfred Hitchcock, represents the dark side of obesity. It is a commonplace that Hitchcock's artistic vision was coloured by his weight (at the age of 40, he tipped 26 stone), his shambling social inadequacy contributing to his misanthropy, his unrequited passions to the sense of yearning in his greatest work. Less remarked on is the way he worked out his demons about his bulk in Rear Window (1954). It is often discussed as a film about cinema, but more broadly, it is about appearances. James Stewart, laid up in his flat, sees a man across the courtyard acting suspiciously. The man's wife is away and Stewart suspects him of murdering her. His friend, a cop, argues that there could be any number of innocent explanations. Appearances can deceive. Stewart turns out to be right.

What is interesting is that the chief change Hitchcock made from the Cornell Woolrich short story was in the physique of the killer. 'Didn't run to much bulk,' is how Woolrich describes him, which couldn't be said of Raymond Burr, whose heaving, Hitchcock-like form plays such an important part in the movie. Is there not a bitter self-portrait here? You can judge by grotesque appearances, Hitchcock is saying. One of Stewart's other neighbours is a bikini-clad exercise freak whom he dubs 'Miss Torso'. At the end of the film (again, not in the story), her soldier sweetheart returns home, and turns out to reach no higher than her bosom. It is a throwaway joke, patently insincere. Hitchcock, as he showed in the main plot, knew that physical oddity did not garner such rewards.

Hitchcock never worked with his fellow Home Counties-born fat man, Sydney Greenstreet, who to many eyes is the quintessential fatty. After his screen debut in The Maltese Falcon (1941), aged 61, Warners received fan mail addressed simply to 'The Fat Man'. His background was in Shakespeare, latterly on Broadway, but he seemed to have leapt straight from Dashiell Hammett's novel, the image of Casper Gutman, down to the 'throaty purr' and eyes that were 'dark gleams in ambush behind pink puffs of flesh'. He is the centre of the film, its guiding spirit. It is his jovial effusiveness ('By Gad, sir, you're a chap worth knowing, an amazing character') and art-for-art's- sake trickery (palming a note off Bogart, just to test him) that win out over Mary Astor's ruthless ambition. John Huston was right to alter the book's ending to let him live another day.

Huston, also a debutant, was instrumental in Greenstreet's impact, shooting him in close- up from low angles, so that his 20-odd stone looked more like 25. Greenstreet never worked for such a good director again, and though he longed to stretch himself ('You'd hardly expect a musician to keep to one string on his violin,' he once said), more than half of his 24 film roles were villains. Once a talented schoolboy sportsman, he joked about his weight and career, a man at ease with his shape. What a loss to cinema's sparse supply of Shakespearean comedy that his celebrated Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night was never filmed.

SO WHO is the exception to the rule of thwarted fat men? If anyone, maybe Charles Laughton, who in a few performances out-acted anybody in film, fat or thin. Yes, he over-acted at times, but wasn't that a way of asserting himself over the wretchedness of the material? In Hobson's Choice (1954), clutching his braces and puffing his great stomach, he has an odd mixture of gaiety and tottering indignity, a surly, decayed grandeur, which steals the show from the milksops we're supposed to be admiring. How satisfying to see a great fat actor outsmart a director called Lean.

'I think I did not admire Charles as much as many did,' wrote Laurence Olivier to Laughton's widow. 'There was a possible envy about me playing roles he was denied on account of physical appearance, and I felt in his appearance lay the root of what people considered his genius.' So it is that Spartacus (1960) is a battle between Laughton and Olivier (both Roman senators), fat and thin actor, emotionalist and technician, as between Rome and Kirk Douglas. The best scenes are the confabs between Laughton and Peter Ustinov (conflabs?), mainly penned by Ustinov: 'You and I have a tendency towards corpulence,' confides Laughton. 'Corpulence makes a man reasonable, pleasant and phlegmatic. Have you noticed the nastiest of tyrants are invariably thin?'

The movies haven't, continuing to regard the fat man as the lowest form of life. He is always on the sidelines, like another Ustinov character, the ring-master in Lola Montes, in love with the notorious Lola, goading and barking, but never able to consummate - forever on the edge of the action.

This survey has left out a number of fat favourites. W C Fields was more a curmudgeonly character actor than an out-and-out fat man, and lacked the necessary neuroses (anyone who could crack: 'a blonde drove me to drink, and my one regret is that I never thanked her,' is too sanguine for this company); Marlon Brando's great work was done in his thin days; the heirs of Belushi, such as the late John Candy, have brought a punkish insouciance to the condition, but few breakthrough roles; Robbie Coltrane is rightly being taken seriously, but so far mainly on television. Of course, there have been fat women on film, from the silent star Marie Dressler to Genevieve Lemon, the unbalanced heroine of Jane Campion's Sweetie. To all of these, I can only say, as no doubt too many cameramen have before, that I'm sorry I couldn't get you all in.

We can only hope for a less prejudiced future. It is time for our heavier brethren to be given characters as large and rounded as them. Why not a film of Hamlet, starring John Goodman?

Fat chance.

'The Flintstones' (U) opens nationwide on Fri.

(Photographs omitted)