Man on the Flying Trapeze

Starts off with a terrible first 15 minutes and never recovers. It gets a bit better, has some funny moments and the ending is good but on the whole it's really slow and the jokes are overplayed.

Some very funny scenes, including physical gags and exaggerated sound effects. Part of Fields' appeal is his comic 'naturalness', and it is on full display here in a more put-upon nice guy role than usual. Simple understated gestures often reap dividends, and watching Fields trying to untangle himself from increasingly knotty situations provides much amusement.

A mighty skinny plot (seems like a 3 Stooges short fleshed out to an hour). But fun shenanigans with W C's socks and so forth, and the great line: "Burglars are singing in my cellar!" Also the Gertrude Stein parody was quite amusing. His wife was definitely hard to take for too long though ("Yes, dear...").

Star Rating: ★★★

A typical W.C. Fields comedy with slooooooow comedy streeeeeetched ouuuuuuut aaaasssss looooooong aaaaaaasssss poooooosssssssssible...... But none does it better! "Burglars are singing in my cellar!", "No parking" and wrestling (with Ali Baba vs Tor Johnson) makes it more then worth wild!