It's a Gift

Whenever I watch a comedy I inevitably find myself thinking, "this isn't bad but what it really needs is more whining, nagging, drawn out jokes with no punchline, grating voices and misunderstandings." Those are the true hallmarks of comedy. Evidently Fields felt the same way because this film consists entirely of these things.

God, W.C. Fields fucking sucks. This was utter hell, almost every moment of it irritating and predictable. It's the kind of "comedy" where you just want to murder everyone. And some of the worst comic timing I've ever witnessed. A scene where Fields tries to get some sleep goes on for a torturous 11 and a half minutes. Ho ho, I wonder what wacky distraction will wake him up next? A coconut rolling down the stairs?! Hilarious! A couple of decent one-liners, but that's it.

Boy, has this dated badly. It's OK but even the legendary "Carl LaFong" sequence isn't that great

annoying and not funny.

Fields is great as always, but Norman Z. McLeod's direction seems to suck funny out of the movie.

# 369

What a painfully unfunny wreck. No one on set seems to have any sense of comedic timing, the deliveries are all terrible and every single character is so annoying that you just want the film to end as soon as possible so that you don't have spend any more time around them.

Bearing little resemblance to the comedies McLeod made with The Marx Brothers, it takes time to build gags, and the payoffs are sometimes deflating, but its loose, seemingly carefree, pace is often an asset, allowing gags to arise more organically from less orthodox methods, especially compared to other comic films of the period. Fields has a few great lines, and his mix of dry humour and slapstick combined with his grouchy demeanor produces some real laughs.

Retarded is the only way I can describe this, but it is retarded in the funniest imaginable way.

423

Carl LaFong.

87.00

Just another W.C. Fields joint. The humor may be a bit dated but some of the stuff is timeless. There's the familiar trope of "man down on his luck, nagging wife and bratty children in tow". The whole thing feels like a stage play at times, very vaudevillian. A lot of the jokes are really driven to the ground at times, but there are enough yuks to make it not feel like a complete waste of time.

428

This has a few laughs in it, but it's mostly a dated comedy with a lot of slapstick humor that mostly misses, at least to my modern eyes. There are some scenes that go on way too long. This was actually my first Fields movie. He seems to be doing his best, but I'm not sure if it's the screenplay or direction that fail him here. It's not a terrible watch, especially since it's only 67 minutes, but not much here.

I enjoyed the shaving sequence, especially for its use of silence. However, the rest was downhill from there. I suspect Fields' form of comedy would be pretty successful in short films. However, stretched out to over an hour, this film feels overlong, meandering, and difficult to endure, due to Fields' constant messing up or his wife giving him the third degree.

W.C. Fields is such a dry comic that it takes some getting used to. Here it comes together nicely, but Field's will always be one that don't hit the hilarious button or doesn't want to. He is more about the absent minded, stretched out gags that are both annoyingly irritating and absurdly funny at the same time. That's his thing. Of the gags I loved was the ones involving the blind man Mr. Muckle (Charles Sellon) and most of all the long sleeping on the porch sequence. Pure W.C. Fields!

#442