Six of a Kind (1934)

Delightfully zany, madcap comedy that serves as a vehicle for no less than six fine comic talents, the charming domestic comedy of Charlie Ruggles and Mary Boland, the verbal nonsense of George Burns and Gracie Allen, and the great character humor of W.C. Fields and Alison Skipworth. For its freewheeling, loose 62 minute running time, the plot is actually rather complicated: Bank clerk Ruggles and his wife Boland are setting off by car on their second honeymoon, and have advertised for another couple to travel with them to help share expenses. To their horror, they get stuck with Burns and Allen, who intend on riding with them all the way to California and proceed to turn the trip into a nightmare. Meanwhile, a fellow bank clerk has stolen a small fortune and smuggled it out of the bank in Ruggles' suitcase, and follows the couple on their journey in pursuit of the loot. The characters and situations all run into one another in a small-town hotel, run by Alison Skipworth and watched over by W.C. Fields as Sheriff "Honest John" Hoxley.

This fast-paced road comedy is directed with characteristic skill by the great Leo McCarey. It's the kind of leisurely--paced comedy where the plot can be put on hold for several minutes at a time while W.C. Fields regales long-time stooge Tammany Young with his rambling story of how he came to be known as "Honest John" (due to his returning a man's lost glass eye), or while Gracie Allen explains to George Burns that her niece has three feet (since she last saw her, she grew another foot). Rather than distracting from the plot, these isolated sequences provide some of the film's biggest highlights. Even with these interludes, the pace and energy never lag thanks to McCarey's expert direction, and when the routines are this good, who cares about the story?

Although he doesn't appear till nearly the last third of the film's running time, Fields very nearly steals the picture. This film was made during the height of his creative powers at Paramount, when he was alternating between his own series of starring vehicles, and appearances in ensemble comedies in which he shared the stage with other fine talents. His assured performance provides so many really funny moments, many of which appear to have been improvised or at least suggested by Fields, that he becomes the most interesting part of the film to watch. It's a tribute to the Great Man's talents that he was able to find so much to do with this role, which amounts to little more than a supporting part, and to inject so many memorable bits of business into his scenes.

Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935)

MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE is a masterpiece of construction and a comic study in frustration that must rank among the very finest of W.C. Fields' screen vehicles, produced at the height of his creative powers at Paramount in 1935. Fields plays Ambrose Wolfinger, a henpecked family man whose only desire is to take the afternoon off work (for the first time in 25 years) to attend a wrestling match for which he's scrimped and saved to buy a front row ticket. What begins as a white lie to get out of the office for the afternoon quickly snowballs into total chaos, bringing Ambrose's world crashing down around him. Aside from possibly IT'S A GIFT, this is Fields' most minimal comedy in terms of plot. The simple set-up -- based on a story by Fields and his good friend Sam Hardy -- provides an endless parade of indignities, frustrations, setbacks and humiliations, which make the well-fulfillment ending -- when the worm finally turns and Fields' antagonists get their comeuppance -- all the more satisfying.

It is perhaps only less successful than IT'S A GIFT in its use of larger-scale gags, such as Fields chasing a tire down the street and across a train trestle (a sequenced either aided or marred, depending on your perspective, by patently phony back projection), which lack the poetic simplicity of the sleeping porch sequence or the shaving scene in the earlier film. The best moments are the smallest: Fields wracking up four parking tickets in quick succession, his interaction with his hostile family at the breakfast table, and his seemingly endless preparation for bedtime. But Fields and director Clyde Bruckman so expertly escalate the events into a comic crescendo that they take on a kind of epic quality. The deliberate pacing allows the frustration produced by the situations to simmer below the surface, brewing uneasily like the calm before a storm.

Fields is also greatly supported by a fine ensemble cast that deserves special mention: Kathleen Howard as his shrewish wife, Mary Brian as his sympathetic daughter, Vera Lewis as his harridan of a mother-in-law, and Grady Sutton as his lazy, oafish brother-in-law, all of whom contribute immeasurably to the film with their fine performances. One can see, too, the affection Fields clearly had even for writing minor characters and giving expert character actors the opportunity to flesh them out and turn them into memorable roles in their own right, such as Oscar Apfel as the blustering boss, Lucien Littlefield as the toadying manager, Lew Kelly as the weary beat cop, and Walter Brennan and Tammany Young as a couple of bumbling burglars. There was no such thing as a small part in a W.C. Fields comedy.

MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE was a remake of Fields' earlier silent comedy, RUNNING WILD (1927), and a comparison between the two films reveals the developments he had made with his screen character in the intervening decade. His Elmer Finch in the earlier film lacks the depth of Ambrose Wolfinger, and Elmer's transformation from lamb to lion is brought about artificially through hypnosis, whereas Ambrose finds the courage to assert himself due to the onslaught of indignities he has suffered over the course of the film. As a result, Elmer's ferocious turn of character, in which he is hypnotized to believe he is a lion, feels forced because it is so out of proportion to what has come before, and also has the effect of making his character unsympathetic. Significantly, Ambrose's climactic outburst of anger only occurs when his daughter's well-being is threatened, rather than his own, revealing a paternal, protective instinct that enhances the humanity of his character as well as justifying his outrage.

Along with IT'S A GIFT and THE BANK DICK, MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE stands as one of the greatest of all W.C. Fields' comedies.

"So's Your Old Man" (1926)

For many years, "So's Your Old Man" was one of the hardest W.C. Fields films to see (when I inquired about it on an online newsgroup in 2000, I was informed that only a single print of it existed in the Library of Congress). Apparently the film was recently restored by the LOC, and within the last year, it has been making the rounds at a couple venues, including the W.C. Fields exhibit at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. I was able to catch a screening of it at Film Forum, where it was shown in a pristine 35mm print (looking as good as it must have back in 1926!) and accompanied with a live piano score by Steve Sterner. It was shown as part of the "Hollywood on the Hudson" series, showcasing films made in the New York and New Jersey areas.

What's remarkable is just how closely the film was remade by Fields in 1934, as "You're Telling Me". This silent film suffers in parts, as many late-silents do, by being a film that practically cries out for dialogue. This isn't even necessarily the case with Fields himself, but rather the expository scenes that rely heavily on dialogue to set up key plot points (there are several scenes that seem to go on too long, with the actors even talking to eachother in shot/reverse shot!) This tendency mars a lot of late-silents for me (Milestone's "The Racket" being another key example), and it's interesting to note that the 1934 sound remake might even be a more visual film than this one!

The premise is rather complicated: Sam Bisbee (Fields), a crackpot inventor, has perfected his latest wonder: a shatter-proof windshield. His daughter (Kittens Reichert) is engaged to be married to Robert Murchison (Charles "Buddy" Rogers, a year before his breakthrough performance in "Wings"). Mrs. Murchison (Julia Ralph) comes to call on Mrs. Bisbee (Marcia Harris, in a really funny performance) and is horrified when she meets her bumbling, coarse husband. The engagement is called off, and Bisbee heads off for Washington DC to make good by selling his shatter-proof glass to an auto company.

Once there, he proceeds to create disaster when his car is moved from the no-parking zone without his knowledge, and he proceeds to hurl bricks at the windows of an identical car that has parked nearby. With the police, and two angry auto owners, out to get him, Bisbee takes off and catches the train home. While on the train, he attempts to commit suicide, but fails repeatedly. This is one of the best-played scenes in the picture, with Fields reactions to his fellow traveler shaving with a dangerously sharp razor being some of the funniest moments in the film. On the same train is Princess Lescaboura of Spain, whom Bisbee meets when he believes she, too, is about to commit suicide. After talking her out of it, and explaining his own problems to her, she decides to help him by showing up in his hometown and restoring his standing in the community, saving the day for Fields' business deal as well as securing the happiness of his daughter.

Now comes the film's best scene: the golf tournament. This routine was filmed two other times by Fields, once in 1930 as "The Golf Specialist" (in which Al Wood played the caddy) and again in "You're Telling Me", this time with the great Tammany Young as his stooge. Here, though, Fields plays the scene with William "Shorty" Blanche, who'd appeared with Fields onstage in the sketch from which this scene was taken, and it's a real treat to see the two perform together. The scene works surprisingly well in the silent film format, and in some ways works even better because of the heightened emphasis on the visual nature of the scene, although one does miss Fields' muttering as he struggles with every conceivable obstacle.

The final scene, which was repeated in "You're Telling Me" and was later copied by Rodney Dangerfield in "Easy Money", has Fields bidding farewell to his family, who now look up to him as something of a hero, then sneaking off to the garage for a drink with his buddies. It's a delightfully satisfying conclusion to the film, and neatly wraps up this little comedy of wish-fulfillment very nicely.

This film was directed by the talented comedy director Gregory LaCava, a good personal friend of Fields'. It's tempting to view the film in light of the 1934 remake, because that version is one of Fields' best vehicles from that period, and works very creatively with sound in a number of scenes, including the shaving scene on the train, and the final golf tournament. Interestingly, one of the best scenes from the "You're Telling Me" that is totally absent from "So's Your Old Man" is the opening sequence in which Fields comes home, drunk, and uses one of his inventions to guide his key into the keyhole. This is a purely visual scene that would have worked well in a silent comedy, but it only goes to show the ways in which Fields was continually adapting and maturing his own cinematic style over the years. Even though Fields never took directing credit, he was heavily involved in all aspects of the construction of his films, and it's not an exaggeration to say that Fields' films improved as he had the opportunity to develop and expand on ideas he'd worked with before. A minor difference, too, is that in the remake, Fields' invention becomes puncture-proof tires rather than the shatter-proof windshields of the original. Another difference is in the pet that Fields picks out to bring home to his wife as a peace offering: in this film, it's a pony; in the remake, it's an ostrich. Frankly, the ostrich is much funnier, and the scene where Fields and the ostrich both bury their heads in the ground works much better than the scene in this film in which he and the pony munch on grass. One other delightful bit that is present in the remake, but not the original, is another highly visual scene in which Fields rolls a tire along the sidewalk, followed by a bunch of neighborhood kids. It's a fun, spontaneous kind of scene that adds a real dimension of sympathy to Fields' character.

It's perhaps unfair, though, to criticize any aspect of this film in relation to its sound remake. As a piece of silent comedy, it alternates between good moments of visual and physical humor (and Fields was still quite capable of rough physical comedy at this point in his career) and scenes that go on just a bit too long without the aid of spoken expository dialogue.

In "The Silent Clowns", Walter Kerr discusses Fields under his chapter on "The Demiclowns". He points to a key problem with Fields' work in silent films when he notes that "the comedian could not become whole-or a star of the first magnitude-until the visual and the verbal in him stopped interrupting each other, ceased occupying separate frames" (Kerr, 295). Fields may not have been an inherently silent comedian like Chaplin or Keaton, but his unique style of comedy was visual enough that many of his best sequences work in silence, such as the golf routine here, or the sleeping porch sequence in "It's the Old Army Game" (also 1926).

If Fields' comic persona only became whole with the added dynamic of sound, it could be said that Fields' whole cinematic art only achieved its mature style with sound, too. His silent comedies are delightful films in their own right, however, and "So's Your Old Man" works as a real crowd-pleaser, if tonight's screening at Film Forum is any indication. It was a rare treat to see America's greatest screen humorist in a tailor-made vehicle, in a splendid print with an appreciative audience.