October 10, 1941
Universal
Comedy
DVD
B-
This movie grew on me as it went on. For the first twenty or twenty-five minutes, I was bored by the not-quite-real-life behind-the-scenes view of Esoteric Studio. And then Fields shares his script with "Franklin Pangborn" (this time not only married but a film producer). And things start getting surreal. Almost every criticism you can think of for the script is voiced by an indignant Pangborn. Even when we're back in the "real" world, everything is exaggerated, like the frantic drive to a maternity hospital all over a not-yet-overdeveloped Los Angeles, or the soda shop scene that Fields tells us the censor wouldn't let him make into a saloon. In whichever world Fields is in, he this time has a loyal niece (not daughter), Gloria Jean, sort of as herself. She was then 15, and would go on to Copacabana (1947). (She sings in both.) Margaret Dumont does not play any version of herself, but instead a rich woman who's raising her lovely young daughter on a Russian mountain-top, far away from men, till Fields literally drops into their lives, from the passenger deck of an airplane. A Russian mountain-top with monkeys. An airplane with sleeping compartments. He falls because he's chasing a bottle of booze. And you thought International House was surreal!
Fields's girlfriend Carlotta Monti again plays a secretary, as she did in The Man on the Flying Trapeze, although not his this time. Charles McMurphy was in My Little Chickadee. Bill Wolfe was in both My Little Chickadee and The Bank Dick. June Preston was in You Can't Cheat an Honest Man. Kay Deslys was in The Big Store. Victor Potel would go on to The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. Brick Sullivan would be in both It's a Wonderful Life and Singin' in the Rain.
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