It’s a Gift *****

 

by Allan Fish

continuing the top 25 series, no.23

(USA 1934 70m) DVD1/2

California, here we come

p  William le Baron  d  Norman Z.McLeod  w  Jack Cunningham  story  W.C.Fields, J.P.McEvoy  ph  Henry Sharp  art  Hans Dreier, John B.Goodman 

W.C.Fields (Harold Bissonette), Jean Rouverol (Mildred Bissonette), Julian Madison (John Durston), Kathleen Howard (Amelia Bissonette), Tommy Bupp (Norman Bissonette), Baby le Roy (Baby Ellwood Dunk), Charles Sellon (Mr Muckle), Tammany Young (Everett Hicks), Morgan Wallace (Jasper Fitchmueller), Josephine Whittell (Mrs Dunk), T.Roy Barnes (salesman), Spencer Charters (guard), Del Henderson (Abernathy),

Paging Carl LaFong!  It’s a Gift is one of the undisputed masterpieces of American screen comedy and W.C.Fields’ greatest film.  No other film has got close to its surreal humour, its irreverence and its lopsided view of family life as a purgatory to be endured.  At one point Fields threatens to hit his small son, reasoning the act away with a “he’s not going to tell me I don’t love him.”  He used the same line in The Bank Dick a few years later, so it was obviously a favourite, but never was it better used (or more appropriate as the brat really is an advert for infanticide). 

            Harold Bissonette (pronounced Bis-On-Ay, surely an influence on TV’s Hyacinth Bouquet) is a small town grocer with a hapless braindead assistant and a family from hell, lead by a wife who is surely an advert for euthanasia.  He dreams of buying an orange grove when their sick relative dies and his wife won’t hear of such irresponsibility, but Harold sells up his store and buys a ranch anyway from his prospective son-in-law.  Yet even when it turns out that the ranch is a dud and the company try and refund him he refuses, thinking them to just want it back because it’s actually worth something.

Fields is undoubtedly one of life’s unfortunates, but always seems to come out on top.  He may endure hardship upon humiliation upon disgrace, but he bears it all with only the help of his trusty liquor flask.  Never in all Fields’ films has he encountered such troubles.  Firstly there’s the hilarious grocer’s routine with the poor customer who never gets his kumquats and that legendary weapon of mass destruction, the unaccompanied deaf and blind man, Mr Muckle, who reduces the entire shop to rubble.  Oh, and the brat from hell who lets molasses drip onto the floor.  Yet topping even this is the extended ten minute plus sequence of Fields trying to get to sleep.  Nagged to death by a wife who hears only what she wants to hear, he goes outside to the veranda hanging bench to get some sleep.  Through the efforts of a leaden-shoed neighbour arguing with her mother what to get and where to go (“I’d like to tell you both where to go” Fields murmurs), a salesman looking for the aforementioned Mr LaFong, the horrific toddler from the shop dropping grapes into his mouth from above prompting Fields’ all-time great line “shades of Bacchus!“, a coconut that seems to think itself a lemming and the bench itself, which crashes to the floor on more than one occasion.   We’ve all been there, trying to sleep while little things exaggerate themselves in the mind to the point where your own breathing seems to disturb you, but here it is intensified and amplified to the N^th degree until our poor fellow has really had enough.  However, in spite of the greatness of both these scenes, my favourite has to be the shaving scene where Fields is interrupted by his blissfully unaware daughter and prevented from shaving until he has to resort to drastic measures.  Throw in scenes such as Fields opening canned tomatoes with an axe, burning the deckchair he couldn’t open and levering himself out of an ashcan with a spade and you have a laugh a minute comedy. 

As always the supporting cast merely orbit around the great man but Howard is horrific as the wife from your worst nightmare, Young is typically dead as the assistant and Sellon is beyond immortal as Mr Muckle.  And though the contribution of director Norman McLeod (also of the Marx Brothers’ Horse Feathers) cannot be underestimated (it’s certainly his best directed film), this is Fields’ show all the way.  His wife may tell him to “wake up and go to sleep.” (go figure!), but you’ll never be in danger of nodding off.