A long time ago I had a friend who was a prison guard at Riker\u2019s Island and he was a movie buff.\u00a0 And he introduced me to the films of W. C. Fields.\u00a0 Most people my age recognize Fields\u2019 trademark nasal tone, whiskey flask, bulbous nose and endless wisecracks.\u00a0 But I guess not many have seen many of his films.\u00a0 I never had before that time and I was immediately hooked on the absurdity of this comic everyman battling the endless affronts he suffers at the hands of wives, children, neighbors, bosses, policemen and any other authority figure who darkened his path.\u00a0 Deep down he just wants to live life his own way.\u00a0 And you can see that he still retains a child-like hope that he will somehow triumph.\u00a0 By the final reel of these films, a catastrophe has engulfed him and he appears to hit rock bottom.\u00a0 But then the magical reversal at the finale creates a deus ex machina that rights all wrongs and he lives happily ever afterward.<\/p>\n
The two movies my friend introduced me to were early and both had Fields as a long suffering husband.\u00a0 And in both movies his wife was played to perfection by an actress named Kathleen Howard who was a large overbearing woman with a shrewish temperament, an acid tongue and the lungs of a Wagnerian opera singer who continually browbeat him over every imaginable fault she could summon.\u00a0 She is his perfect foil.<\/p>\n
These early movies are a sort of halfway point between a string of vaudeville skits and an actual scripted movie.\u00a0 Some of the routines involve sight gags that often are carried too far.\u00a0 And the plot is usually ridiculously thin.\u00a0 Some folks who enjoy Fields\u2019 movies prefer the more polished movies like the \u201cThe Bank Dick\u201d and \u201cNever Give a Sucker an Even Break.\u201d\u00a0 But for me in these earlier movies the comic delivery is hilarious and the happily ever after endings absurdly wonderful.<\/p>\n
So, the plot of \u201cIt\u2019s a Gift\u201d (1934) has Harold Bissonette as the owner of a grocery store in New Jersey who dreams of being an orange farmer in California.\u00a0 Naturally he throws away his whole settled existence and drags his family across depression era America to follow his dream.\u00a0 And naturally the result is disaster.<\/p>\n
In \u201cThe Man on the Flying Trapeze,\u201d (1935) Ambrose Woolfinger is a memory expert working for the Malloy Textile firm.\u00a0 But what he\u2019d like to be is a professional wrestler.\u00a0 So, when he takes the afternoon off to go watch the wrestling match under the pretext of his mother-in-law\u2019s funeral all hell breaks loose.<\/p>\n
As I said the plots are ludicrously thin, the acting is pure ham and the sight gags painfully long.\u00a0 My family runs for the exits whenever I pop one of these in the DVD player. \u00a0But I believe that any married man whose heart doesn\u2019t sing with joy when Harold Bisonette or Ambrose Woolfinger finally gets the upper hand is a lost soul who cannot be redeemed and deserves to be fed feet first into the matriarchy.<\/p>\n
As you can tell from my description, these movies are not for everyone.\u00a0 If they sound intriguing maybe you\u2019ll give them a try.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A long time ago I had a friend who was a prison guard at Riker\u2019s Island and he was a movie buff.\u00a0 And he introduced<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,238,237,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-classic-movie-reviews","category-reviews","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n