I didn't see any trapeze

Recently, I watched another of the titles on my box set of W.C. Fields movies, Man on the Flying Trapeze.

Fields once again plays a henpecked husband, this time named Ambrose Wolfinger. This is his second marriage, as his first wife died when his daughter Hope (Mary Brian) was young, and Ambrose felt she needed a mother. Unfortunately his wife Leona (Kathleen Howard) is a nag, and his mother-in-law Mrs. Neselrode (Vera Lewis) is far worse. To top it all off, she's got a layabout son (so Ambrose's brother-in-law) Claude (Grady Sutton) who can't be bothered to look for work, so Ambrose is effectively supporting five people.

The movie starts off with two crooks showing up in the basement of the Wolfinger house while Ambrose is in the bathroom "brushing his teeth" -- with some of the apple jack that he's been making in the cellar. Eventually he and a cop confront the two burglars.

Ambrose has tickets to a big wrestling match, and he's planning to go, but it's in the middle of the day and he'd have to get off work for it. Now, he's been working for the same company -- an importer of woollens -- for 25 years and is quite good at his job, which is apparently to keep track of all the potential clients and what their interests are and their lives are like, so that the bosses can schmooze more effectively with the clients. But supposedly in all those 25 years he's never gotten a day off. Really?

So, to be able to get that afternoon off, even though Claude has tried to steal the tickets, Ambrose says that his mother-in-law has died from drinking poisoned liquor. The bosses get Ambrose's coworkers to send flowers, and they take out a story in the paper detailing the mother-in-law's death (which of course never actually happened) to warn people about bad liquor. When they discover the truth, which is that Mrs. Neselrode isn't really dead, it could cost Ambrose his job.

Man on the Flying Trapeze is an odd little movie, because it's not really a full-fledged story, but a series of gag strung together into something that supposedly has a plot. Some of the gags work better than others, and depending on your sense of humor some of them may not work at all. The whole opening sequence with the burglars didn't really work for me, for example. Thankfully, at about 66 minutes it's all over fairly quickly if it turns out not to be your cup of tea.

I think, however, that fans of Fields are still going to like Man on the Flying Trapeze. And the box set wasn't that expensive.