Never Give a Sucker an Even Break

I mentioned Gloria Jean some weeks back when her death was announced, and how I had her performance in W.C. Fields' Never Give a Sucker an Even Break on DVD so I'd have to get around to watching it and doing a full-length review.

Fields is, of course, the star, nominally playing a screenwriter who is trying to option his script to Esoteric Pictures. It's up to producer Franklin Pangborn (Franklin Pangborn playing a character with the same name, which I presume is the joke) to decide on the script. But he's also looking at a new juvenile star Gloria (Gloria Jean) who happens to be Fields' niece.

Gloria gets an audition which allows her to showcase her operatic voice; one assumes that the real-life Gloria Jean being at universal was being groomed to replace Deanna Durbin should Durbin ever have gotten ideas above her station. After that audition and some vintage Fields routines, we get the bulk of the movie, which is a dramatization of some of the scenes in the Fields movie-within-a-movie screenplay. The first one has Fields jumping out of a plane to retive a bottle of liquor, only to land at the mountaintop estate of Mrs. Hemogloben (Margaret Dumont) and her daughter (Susan Miller). There's a second scene involving the "Russian" expat village near the Hemogloben place. But these are just hooks to hang more zany comic scenes.

After the screenplay is panned, there's a tacked on ending that has Fields trying to get a woman to a maternity hospital but getting stuck in traffic and then being pulled along by a fire truck ladder. Again, just another opportunity to have a scene that seemed more of an homage to silent movies than anything else.

I found Never Give a Sucker an Even Break a difficult movie to review, largely because it is in many ways plotless. The idea of pitching a movie script to a studio is certainly a reasonable idea and one that has been used in many movies. But it really only occupies the middle half of the movie here, and that and the two storylines bookending it have little to no relationship to each other. The movie-within-a-movie also has no plot whatsoever.

As for the acting, Fields is Fields; Margaret Dumont is doing the same stuff she did in the Marx Brothers movies; and Pangborn is also doing his usual routine, as well as ever. Gloria Jean is quite appealing too. Still, I have to think that Never Give a Sucker an even break would appeal more to Fields fans than a broader population, thanks to that lack of a plot.