Never Give a Sucker an Even Break

Never Give a Sucker an Even Break
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.

Man on the Flying Trapeze

Man on the Flying Trapeze
August 3, 1935
Paramount
Comedy
DVD
B-

Well, this movie surprised me.  My expectations were low when I saw that Kathleen Howard again plays Fields's nagging wife, but there's more to her character here, although she's not given as much screen time.  The second half of the movie, with all the complications of Fields's job as a memory expert, his desire to see a wrestling match, and his family troubles (as usual, only the roughly 20-year-old daughter, here named Hope, is loyal to him), is much better than the first, although I can see how that first half sets things up.  The direction, by Fields himself, has much more energy than anything since International House, which admittedly was not just a Fields movie.  There are some nice comic touches, like the way his boss Peabody pronounces "decades" like "decayeds" and "condolences" like you've never heard it before.  Fields even gets a few lines past the censors, like "Nuts!" while stepping on walnuts, and calling a nosegay "nose candy."

Carlotta Monti, Fields's real-life live-in lover, does a fine job playing his secretary, even telling off Peabody, and she would play a receptionist in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.  Lew Kelly and Billy Bletcher were both in The Old Fashioned Way.  Jack Baxley would go on to Double Wedding, both Helen Dickson and Sarah Edwards to It's a Wonderful Life.  And one of the wrestlers is none other than future "star" of Plan Nine from Outer Space Tor Johnson!

Since it's a Paramount comedy, what does the title mean?  I thought that the classic song would be one that the burglars (one played by Walter Brennan, the other of course Tammany Young), the one friendly cop Fields meets, and Fields would sing in their basement quartet, but they don't.  I think the title is meant to be an ironic comment on how Fields's Ambrose Wolfinger isn't daring or young, nor does he float through the air (or life) with the greatest of ease, but there's something quietly heroic about him.  I think this is the first of his movies where I actually cared about his character.