81. It's A Gift (1934)

Directed By Norman Z. McLeod

Synopsis

Grocery shop owner gets inheritance and decides to buy orange farm in California.

Review

If I was writing in my last review about Laurel and Hardy's cringe humour, the same thing is applicable to this film, only more so. In fact the whole film is cringe worthy, you always know there is something going wrong and you keep watching nonetheless. W. C. Fields cuts one of the most pitiable characters in the films reviewed until today, in fact you can't help but sympathise with his situation, living with his terribly annoying wife, his annoying custumers and neighbours. What surprises you is how mild mannered Fields remains through the movie.

W. C. Fields is a great actor here, and he plays the murmmering pitiable drunkard old fool to perfection. If you want to compare it to modern comedy Fields acts a lot more like Geoff out of Marion and Geoff while Hardy is much more a Ricky Gervais in the Office type.

Fields' character is sad and sympathetic, you really wish everything to go right with him and it doesn't until the last minutes. Still, it makes you laugh because you are fortunately not as sad, and surrounded by so many bad people as he is, and no one's life goes so wrong. A great performance in a film that is marred by less than stellar direction and editing, you can sometimes see the cuts in the middle of the scene and in one scene where Fields cracks open a can of tomatoes you can clearly see that is is coming not from the can at all but off-screen, from the left. Still get it at Amazon UK or US.


Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Fields spent his final weeks in a hospital, where a friend stopped by for a visit and caught Fields reading the Bible. He inquired as to why, to which Fields replied, "I'm checking for loopholes." In a final irony, W. C. Fields died in 1946 (due to a stomach hemorrhage) on the holiday he claimed to despise: Christmas Day. As documented in W. C. Fields and Me (published 1971), he died in a bungalow-type sanitarium where, as he lay in bed dying, his long-time and final love, Carlotta Monti, went outside and turned the hose onto the roof, so as to allow Fields to hear for one last time his favorite sound of falling rain. According to the documentary W.C. Fields Straight Up, his death occurred in this way: he winked and smiled at a nurse, put a finger to his lips, and died. Fields was 66.

Fields kept a thermos of martini for purposes of refreshment, which he referred to as his "pineapple juice." One day a prankster switched the contents of the thermos, filling it with actual pineapple juice. Upon discovering the prank, Fields was heard to yell, "Who put pineapple juice in my pineapple juice?"

Ahhh a nice little racist Walt Disney cartoon with W. C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty and see how many more you can guess: