If I Had a Million

I had a post on a different movie scheduled to go up today, when I noticed that the anthology movie If I Had a Million was on the TCM schedule overnight tonight, or the early hours of Tuesday (July 18) at 2:15 AM. Note that this is still late Monday evening on the west coast. A search of the blog, however, claims that while I used the movie once for a Thursday Movie Picks, I've never actually done a full-length post on it. So, since the movie is definitely worth a watch, today's the day to do a more-or-less full-length review.

I say "more or less" because, this being an anthology, the most natural thing to do is to have a one- or two-sentence synopsis of each segment. The framing story involves a wealthy man, John Glidden (Richard Bennett), who is on his deathbed. He's worth at least eight figures, which is a lot today but a huge sum back in 1932, and he's got a lot of grasping relatives he doesn't like. So he decides to give away a million bucks to several random strangers before he dies, by picking names out of the phone book. This leads to eight segments:

• Henry Peabody (Charlie Ruggles) works in a china shop and has a boss he doesn't like, so you can probably guess what he does with his million.
• Violet (Wynne Gibson) is a prostitute working at a bar on the docks. When she gets her million, she makes her way uptown, and....
• Eddie Jackson (George Raft) is a notorious forger who, having gotten a check from Glidden, realizes that no bank will accept it because they'll naturally believe it's a forgery.
• Emily La Rue (Alison Skipworth) is continuously vexed by bad drivers, so her husband Rollo (W.C. Fields) uses the money to buy cars and....
• Gene Raymond plays John Wallace, who is on death row and thinks the million dollars can buy him a new defense so he can be exonerated and go back to his wife Mary (Frances Dee).
• In what is probably the weakest segment, and surprising considering the star, Charles Laughton plays an office clerk who sees the million as what we would today call "fuck you" money.
• Steve Gallagher (Gary Cooper) is a marine in the stockade. He thinks the check is an April Fools joke, which has consequences when he gets out of the stockade.
• Finally, Mary Walker (May Robson) is a resident of an old folks' home where the administrators basically want to warehouse the residents until they die. Mary, however, wants the residents to be able to live, and now that she's got a million, she may be able to make it happen.

As with any anthology movie, different people are going to have different segments that they think are the best, and others which they think are weak. For me, the Wynne Gibson segment is surprisingly profound. Fields and Skipworth unsurprisingly do well with what is little more than zany comedy, but of the sort that was tailor-made for them. Laughton gets a shocking weak script to work with, although it's realistic because in real life all of us have people we'd like to be able to tell off, and having $1 million in 1932 dollars would certainly give one the money to do it.

If you haven't seen If I Had a Million before, by all means make it a point to watch or record this TCM airing. It doesn't show up all that often.

Chickadee of size

Not certain what to do a post on, I noticed that on my Mae West box set I had one movie left that I hadn't done a post on, My Little Chickadee. So I put that in the DVD player and watched it to do a post on here.

Mae West plays Flower Belle Lee, who at the beginning of the movie is riding a stagecoach somewhere in the Old West with the other passengers including one Mrs. Gideon (Margaret Hamilton), who seems slightly more pleasant than the character Hamilton played the previous year in The Wizard of Oz, if only because she doesn't have green make-up and isn't actively trying to kill a little girl and her dog. Anyhow, a Masked Bandit waylays the coach, forcing everybody to get and taking the gold. The Bandit absconds with Flower Belle, because who wouldn't abscond with such a voluptuous lady? And it's not as if you'd abscond with Mrs. Gideon.

But because of this, and because the Bandit shows up again at the home where Flower Belle is staying, she's run out of town, the other townsfolk thinking she might be a woman of ill-repute and in cahoots with the Bandit. So she makes her way by train to Greasewood City, in the hopes of starting a new life. Waiting along the tracks to get a ride to Greasewood City is one Cuthbert J. Twillie (W.C. Fields).

The train is waylaid by Indians, with Flower Belle and Twillie saving the day. Also, Flower Belle sees a large stash of cash in Twillie's carpet bag. So she marries him in the hope of having a rich husband and one who's respectable, while Twillie is willing to marry Flower Belle because, again, she's voluptuous, and he hopes he can score with her. This, even though Flower Belle is pretty open about it being a marriage of convenience (especially once she finds out that the cash isn't legitimate).

In Greasewood, two men vie for Flower Belle's attention. One is the newspaper publisher Wayne Carter (Dick Foran), while the other, Badger (Joseph Calleia), is clearly the sort of guy westerns portray as the "owner" of the town, also responsible for permitting the vice if not owning it outright. Badger has been selecting the sheriffs on the basis of who is too incompetent to be sheriff, much like Tom Destry from Universal's release the previous year Destry Rides Again. Badger sees Twillie, and it's obvious that he'd make a suitable sheriff, at least in terms of what Badger wants. There's still a Masked Bandit out there, and it should be pretty obvious who it will be once the mask is removed, but we've got a little ways to get there yet.

My Little Chickadee is an odd little movie. W.C. Fields and Mae West were both sui generis, and pairing their different styles together is something that has the potential to go badly wrong. Mostly, it doesn't go wrong, but it doesn't hit the high notes it could considering the caliber of the two leads. The big thing is that large parts of it feel more like Fields sketches, and other sections feel like West sketches, with the perfunctory plot being bolted on. It also definitely doesn't help how much the Production Code neutered West.

So My Little Chickadee is an interesting curiosity, but it's certainly not the best movie in either Fields' or West's career.

Poppy

It had been a while since I watched anything off of my W.C. Fields box set, The Big Broadcast of 1938 aside (that being on my Bob Hope box set), so recently I put one of the DVDs in the player and watched Poppy.

Fields, surprisingly, does not play Poppy, since it sounds like it could be a nickname for a father figure. Instead, he's Professor Eustace McGarnagle, one of those traveling medicine men in the late 19th century like Charles Winninger in the recently mentioned Father Is a Bachelor. McGarnagle travels from town to town with his adopted daugher Poppy (Rochelle Hudson).

In the latest town they're in, Poppy falls in love with Billy Farnsworth (Richard Cromwell), son of the town's mayor (Granville Bates). This town once had a rich family, the Putnams, but the last known heir has died so people are trying to get their hands on the Putnam money. One of those is a countess (Catherine Doucet). The Countess' lawyer, Eddie Whiffen (Lynne Overman) convinces McGarnagle that Poppy looks enough like Putnam that she could possibly pass for Putnam's daughter. So why not come up with a forged marriage license claiming McGarnagle married Putnam?

For whatever reason, McGarnagle actually agrees with this, which I suppose is in part to try to give some happiness to Poppy, since the Farnsworths are concerned about Poppy not having any money and being the daughter of a medicine-show man, something which is clearly not an honorably profession. But certainly the ruse is going to be found out!

I found Poppy to be somewhat atypical of the Fields movies I've seen, in that it's not nearly as much about the zany comedy as the other of his movies. Fields does get to do some of his routines, but the dramatic/romance portion of the plot gets a lot of play here. It turns out there are two reasons for this. The first is that Poppy is based on a play in which Field had starred a dozen years earlier before he became a movie star, and then a silent film with Fields reprising his stage role. So he was already identified with the material and doing a talking film update of it is understandable. Fields was also apparently sick during filming which is why his comedy seems much more muted.

As for the romance half of it, it's the sort of thing that 1930s audiences probably would have found quite appealing, but audiences of today would probably find old-fashioned, and not just because it's set in the late 1800s. Hudson and Cromwell do an adequate job, but the plot doesn't feel like anything special. Not a bad movie, mind you, but more memorable for it feeling different from the rest of Fields' oeuvre.

The broadcast of size

About a year ago, I mentioned picking up a cheap Bob Hope box set with a whole bunch of movies I hadn't blogged about before. Recently, I got it back out and put the DVD containing The Big Broadcast of 1938 in the DVD player since I hadn't mentioned a Bob Hope movie in several months.

This was Hope's first feature film, although he had made half a dozen shorts, so he's technically not the star here, although he shows up right at the beginning of the movie. He's Buzz Fielding, a radio announcer who is supposed to be on the S.S. Gigantic, which is going on a transatlantic boat race with the S.S. Colossal, the former having a new radio-powered propeller. But Buzz is currently in jail, because he's got three ex-wives: Cleo (Shirley Ross), Grace (Grace Bradley), and Joan (Dorothy Howe), who are all looking for their alimony. He's also got a fiancée in Dorothy Wyndham (Dorothy Lamour), who bails him out by hocking the engagement ring. Of course, that ring isn't paid for. And Buzz has a $50,000 bet on the Gigantic winning the race.

As for the nominal star of the movie, that's W.C. Fields, playing two characters. T. Frothinghill Bellows owns the Gigantic, and has a brother S.B., also played by Fields. Frothinghill wants his brother to be on the Colossal, as S.B. has a reputation for extremely bad luck, and putting him on the competing ship means it a certainty Bellows' ship will win the race. However, after a golfing scene that has nothing to do with the plot, such as it is, S.B. flies off and lands on the Gigantic.

Buzz and his ex-wives all wind up on the ship, as does Dorothy, along with S.B.'s daughter Martha (Martha Raye, who already has her big mouth in the opening credits). Bob Hayes (Leif Erickson) is the engineer behind the radio propeller, which he may or may not be able to use for various reasons.

But the real point of the movie is for a series of variety numbers. First up is bandleader Shep Fields, whose shtick was "rippling rhythm", whatever that was; he conducts a song with an animated backdrop of an anthropomorphic drop of water. There's a male Mexican singer, and a female opera singer who does Wagner. Some of the stars also get to sing, most notably Hope and Ross doing "Thanks for the Memories", which of course would become Hope's signature song. Fields gets to do a couple more routines.

The Big Broadcast of 1938 was the third (I think) movie Paramount released in the Big Broadcast series, and wasn't really meant to be watched for the plot, more for the musical interludes and comic sequences, making me think of Hollywood Party. I have to admit that I wasn't a huge fan of the variety numbers, and Fields was relatively irritating here. Why, for example, would he stop to play golf (and be obnoxious to everybody around him) instead of getting on the ship? Surely his brother would have made certain he got on the right ship. The movie also ends rather abruptly, as if the writers didn't know how to come up with a real resolution.

Some people may like the variety numbers, as well as Fields' comedy, more than I do. Those people will probably like The Big Broadcast of 1938. For the rest of us, it's more of a time capsule of what audiences might have wanted back in 1938.

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.

The Old Fashioned Way

Some time back I picked up a box set of W.C. Fields movies. One that I hadn't heard of before buying the set is The Old Fashioned Way.

Fields plays The Great McGonigle, the head of a traveling troupe of actors at the turn of the last century. (Any similarity to The Dresser ends right there.) McGonigle is a bit dishonest, although that's in part because the theater managers weren't always scrupulous either. McGonigle is trying to get out of town not having paid room and board, and the landlady has gotten a sheriff to look for McGonigle as he boards the train. McGonigle burns the summons he's about to be served with his cigar as the sheriff has his head turned the other way.

Eventually the troupe gets to their next stop, where they're going to be putting on a temperance play called The Drunkard. But there are problems. In addition to trying to get the money to put on the play, they're also short one cast member. However, a college boy, Wally Livingston (Joe Morrison), wants to be an actor, so he's willing to accept a tryout. Wally also falls in love with McGonigle's daughter Betty (Judith Allen). But neither Betty nor Wally's father thinks marrying into an acting troupe is a good idea.

There's also Mrs. Pepperday (Jan Duggan), whom McGonigle is trying to get the money from. She has no talent, being able neither to sing nor dance, but is insisting on getting a part in the play. She's also got an infant grandson who makes McGonigle's life hell over lunch.

Eventually the show gets put on, and it's interesting for audiences of today to see such a hoary old production. But there's an encore after the play that's even better: Fields comes back out and does some his old vaudeville stuff, juggling balls, followed by manipulating cigar boxes, the latter of which is really a sight to see.

There's not all that much to the plot of The Old Fashioned Way; like a lot of Fields' work it seems more a hook on which to hang a bunch of sketches than a fully coherent plot. But it all works more or less, and the vaudeville act at the end is worth the price of admission.

The box set as a whole is cheap, so even if you don't like this one, it's not as if you're out very much. But I can certainly recommend it more than some of the other Fields movies in the set.

I'm only suggesting

I decided to continue making my way through the W.C. Fields box set I picked up some time back, and this time out watched You're Telling Me! (the exclamation point is in the title, as you can see).

Fields plays Sam Bisbee, an inventor who doesn't have the best of home lives, as he's got a wife (Louise Carter) who is hen-pecking him to death. He's also got an adult daughter Pauline (Joan Marsh) who is in love with young Bob Murchison (Buster Crabbe, who as you can see is billed with his real name and nickname). The only problem is that the Murchisons are rich and the Bisbees are from the "other side of the tracks" (the tracks joke is literally made several times), and Mrs. Murchison (Kathleen Howard) doesn't approve of the wedding at all, even threatening to disinherit Bob.

Bisbee sees his chance to make good with one of his inventions, a puncture-proof tire, a pretty big thing in those less technically advanced days. He gets an offer to demonstrate the tire, but he parks in a no-parking zone and the car gets moved, so when he goes to do the demonstration, he does it on the wrong car, sedans apparently all looking alike in the mid 1930s. He's lost his car and his hopes at his daughter's happiness, so on the train home, he contemplates suicide.

However, he eventually decided against it and while walking back to his seat, he walks into a compartment that the Princess Lescaboura (Adrienne Ames) is using with her entourage, she being on a goodwill tour of America. She's deeply unhappy that she wasn't able to marry the man she wanted, so she's not certain what to do with her life. Bisbee, not knowing she's a princess, talks her out of any thoughts of suicide, and suggests that the only thing that could help his daughter is a fairy princess. Lescaboura being a princess, you can put two and two together....

It might be a surprise, but I'd consider You're Telling Me one of the better Fields movies I've seen, which I think has to with its having a pretty coherent plot. That, and the plot is surprisingly dark for Fields; the idea of a Fields character legitimately contemplating suicide was something I certainly hadn't expected. Fields and Ames do legitimately well in their scene together in the train compartment. Of course, there's a lot of comedy, too. The two big sequences bookended the film and to me were the weakest part of the movie, largely because they didn't drive the plot. In between, there's some of the oddball inventions, and Fields with an ostrich on a leash.

My copy of You're Telling Me! is on a cheap box set Universal put out, and even if the movie was medicore you couldn't beat it for the price.

It's a Gift

I mentioned at the beginning of the week when John Landis was TCM Guest Programmer that one of his selections was the W.C. Fields movie It's a Gift. So I watched it to do a full-length post on it here.

Fields plays Harold Bissonnette, a man with a family that drives him nuts at every turn. His daughter Mildred (Jean Rouverol) commandeers the bathroom and is worried that she'll never see her boyfriend John (Julian Madison) again if the family movies. His young son Norman (Tommy Bupp) is an obnoxious brat who constantly wears roller skates and when he takes them off, leaves them in a place where you know Dad is going to trip over them; you can see it coming a mile away. And then there's Harold's wife Amelia (Kathleen Howard), who henpecks Harold to no end, being as bad as Harcourt Fenton Mudd's wife in the two Star Trek episodes where Harry Mudd appears.

Harold dreams of getting away from the rat race and moviing the family out to California to buy an orange grove, and he's got his eye on a plot, too. He might just be able to get the money, since his uncle Bean is at death's door and that stands to leave an inheritance for Harold, not that the rest of his family want him to use it on an orange grove. Amelia points out that he can't even run the corner grocery store he owns; how is he going to run an orange grove?

Sure enough Bean dies and Harold buys the plot he's had his eyes on, except that there's one small problem. John works for the bank and has found out that that plot has been the subject of some false advertising in that it's not going to grow much of anything, except for weeds, not an orange to be found. But Harold has been so insitent on badgering the bankers into lending him the money that they do so anyway. What is Harold going to do when he finds out his farm isn't all it's cracked up to be?

To be honest, the plot of It's a Gift is even more threadbare than some of Fields' other movies, and serves more as a hook for Fields' set pieces and his brand of physical comedy. This time, however, unlike most of the reviews I've read, everything -- and I mean everything -- fell flat for me. Harold's son is such a jerk and so annoying you want Dad to smack him like what happened to Jane Withers at the end of Bright Eyes. Mrs. Bissonnette is no peach either and there would have been a more interesting movie if Harold just got up and fled to California, abandoning his family.

The various set pieces are equally obnoxious, particularly the one at the grocery store. There's a blind guy depicted as too stupid to use his cane properly, and a customer who wants ten pounds of kumquats, which is supposed to make us laugh because the word "kumquat" supposedly sounds funny. Except that this bit goes on and on and on and the customer is frankly mean instead of funny. The other big set piece is Fields trying to sleep on a porch swing and constantly being interrupted.

Everybody else seems to enjoy It's a Gift, so you will probably want to watch it for yourself to judge. And thankfully, the box set it's on is inexpensive, so even if you don't like this one it's not as if you're out a bunch of money.

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.

Sorry, no pancakes

One of the DVDs I picked up in my most recent set of DVD purchases was a 10-film W.C. Fields box set. Among the movies on it was the completely new-to-me International House.

In the Chinese city of Wuhu, Dr. Wong (Edmund Breese) has invented a "radioscope", a new type of television, or something to compete with the other television-like devices that were in their infancy at the time the movie was released in 1933. Wong wants to sell the rights to the device for western markets, so people from around the world are coming to visit. There's a Russian general (Bela Lugosi), and representing America is Tommy Nash (Stewart Erwin). Except that he's having trouble getting to Wuhu, having to carpool with Peggy Hopkins Joyce (playing herself more or less; the real Joyce was a chorus girl known for marrying rich men).

Into all of this comes the noted adventurer Quail (W.C. Fields). Quail is flying his autogyro somewhere, although where he's supposed to be flying it is part of the joke, as the map shows him going literally all over the place. Quail lands on top of the international hotel in Wuhu, and proceeds to make life difficult for people as he tries to get a room.

That's the plot, more or less. There's not much plot here, and that's part of the point of the movie. Instead, there are a series of sketches, most notably involving George Burns and Gracie Allen, whom I most recently mentioned in the Carole Lombard comedy We're Not Dressing. Allen was noted for playing the ditz and driving Burns nuts, something she does as well here as in everything else I've ever seen her in. The hotel also puts on a musical number involving among others, Sterling Holloway. The television serves a useful purpose here, as every time Dr. Wong tries to tune into the six-day bicycle race, he winds up tuning into another musical act. There's Baby Rose Marie, who by this time was nine years old, so not much of a baby any more. Rudy Vallee does a number, but for me, the highlight was Cab Calloway.

The result is a movie that really has no rights being very good. And yet despite the relative lack of a plot, I found myself laughing quite a bit, which I suppose is a sign that the movie was successful in entertaining. The box set is cheap, so even if you don't like International House, there's likely to be some other movie on the set you'll enjoy. Amazon also lists International House as being available on a standalone DVD as part of Universal's MOD scheme. I have no idea if the print is better; I didn't notice a particularly bad print on the box set.