DPMay
As the years tick by, it seems that modern audiences have less and less time for the comedies of the earlier decades of motion pictures. Certainly here in the UK you'd be hard-pushed nowadays to find any of the output of Chaplin, Keaton, the Marx Brothers or Laurel & Hardy on television. As for Harold Lloyd or Harry Langdon - forget it.W C Fields has, perhaps, never enjoyed a particularly strong following on this side of the Atlantic but even so, there was a time when his films would populate the TV schedules. That time seems past and Fields is unquestionably becoming something of an obscurity. The image of an ageing, obese comedian fell out of favour when audiences turned their backs on once-popular stars of more recent times such as Benny Hill and Bernard Manning and the liquor-loving lechery of W C Fields in this context is unlikely to find much support.Fields oughtn't be so casually dismissed. He was a strong identifiable and quite unique character on screen, and a comedian with a sharp repartee who knew his craft. "Never Give A Sucker An Even Break" dates from the latter stages of his career as ill health was beginning to take a grip of him, but his wit is still on top form and he is still able to engage in a surprising amount of physical comedy.The film betrays the notion that it had a rather turbulent production. The original script apparently contained scenes that are not even alluded to in the finished picture, which would have expanded upon the relationship between Fields and his niece (played by Gloria Jean). Several actors who allegedly shot scenes for this film are wholly absent from the final cut. And at one point even Fields himself breaks the fourth wall to actually tell the watching audience of a scene which was excised at the behest of the censors! What we are left with is a slightly disjointed mess. The plot, such as it is, involves Fields visiting a film studio to try and sell his latest script to a producer. Along the way we are treated to glimpses of the rather chaotic life at the studio where Fields' niece is employed as an up-and-coming star.As the producer reads through Fields' rather far-fetched story idea, the events in the script are related through live action so we actually get to 'see' the movie as Fields' character envisaged it, albeit with interruptions from the producer.This story-within-a-story approach is novel for the time, and is an interesting mirror of the true genesis of "Never Give A Sucker An Even Break", but it is also rather limiting. The 'Esoteric Studios' plot is simply too weak to hold up a feature film and is far more the sort of situation you'd expect to find in a Three Stooges short subject.Much more interesting is the 'inner story', that is the plot of Fields' script that the producer reads, which concerns Fields falling out of an aeroplane and landing in the isolated mountain-top residence of a man-hating woman and her beautiful daughter who has grown to adulthood without even being aware of the existence of men. The arrival of Fields in this situation is ripe for comedy and has great potential, but that potential is barely tapped as too many possibilities are spurned and Fields leaves the scene all too quickly.Fields is easily the most interesting character in this film. Unfortunately too many of the others are found wanting and the sequences where Fields is absent suffer badly because they rely on weak comedy from others (notably Franklin Pangborn as the film producer, and juvenile double-act Butch and Buddy) and rather superfluous musical scenes in which the very capable Gloria Jean sings numbers which are badly dated now.The film ends rather abruptly after a lengthy car chase sequence which again has little relevance to the plot, and seems contrived to give the film a more spectacular conclusion, but in reality it's not a conclusion at all - whilst Fields' character was determined to reach a specific destination the rather thin plot, sadly, was not going anywhere and so the film just - well, ends.
tedg
This is possibly the last gasp of vaudevillian humor in movies, and to my mind the best beyond the early Marx brothers movies — which were just filmed acts.But this is something quite different, firmly a film, a folded film, the kind I like.The deal is simple. Fields at this time was an unreliable drunk whose humor was considered outdated. He could only get a movie financed if he was able to use it to feature a young actress whose presence is completed unrelated to what he wants to do.So. Fields writes and makes a movie about what? Himself as an unreliable drunk who cannot get a movie made unless it features a young girl. A third of the movie is a traditional Fields movie, with mistaken punches, punchline gags and his obnoxious humor. A car chase.A third of the movie is more of the same, except focused on the storyline of Fields going over his script. The producer keeps denigrating the story.And the final third is the movie he makes, with fantastic effects. All three of these have Fields being Fields and Gloria Jean shoehorned in, in the most intensionally jarring ways with musical numbers and endearing face shots.Whether you like Fields' humor is a matter of taste. I do like it because it is so honest. This isn't an act: he really was drunk and belligerent, closing down production frequently. But whether you like the humor or not, you have to admire the way this thing is constructed. It is all about jumping among these three narrative stances, and the movie within the movie within is all based on plot devices that feature jumping among scenarios.This was, in my opinion an influential movie in furthering the notions of folded narrative in film.Ted's Evaluation -- 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.
lugonian
NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK (Universal, 1941), directed by Edward Cline, stars the legendary comic, WC Fields, in his final starring role. While Fields' catchphrase title might indicate a circus story or one about a man cheating at cards, it's actually a satire on Hollywood, in fact, Fields poking fun of himself. In spite of some Hollywood in-jokes, two or three separate stories for the price of one, along with site gags lifted with some alterations taken from earlier Fields comedies to assure guaranteed belly laughs, this is probably the strangest comedies ever made, even for Fields, and it's funny. Actually, for a movie without a real story, it's quite funny. It even features teenage soprano Gloria Jean acting as Fields' niece. She's not really funny but adds that certain charm into the story, even when frequently saying to herself or looking directly to the camera, "My Uncle Bill, and I still love him." She takes time out to sing a couple of songs, either straight through or with interruptions by others, and even with that, it's still funny. In short, for a movie that bears no resemblance to a movie, it's very funny.From an original story by Otis Griblecoblis (guess who that is), the scenario revolves around W.C. Fields playing himself as he goes to Esoteric Studios for a conference with production head (Franklin Pangborn playing himself), to present a screenplay he has written for his next production. After Pangborn reads through the script (in which Fields, Jean and Leon Errol enact their roles through add in sequences for the movie audience), he finds it an insult to a man's intelligence, even his, for that the story, consisting of Fields traveling on an airplane with his niece, consisting of compartment beds, later to jump overboard from an observation deck to retrieve his liquor bottle that has fallen, landing unharmed on the mountaintop where lives the middle-aged Daisy Hemogloben (Margaret Dumont), the richest woman in the world, and her youthful daughter, Ouliotta (Susan Miller), who has never seen a man, which leads Fields to teach her a kissing game. Because Mrs. Hemoglobem is worth millions, Fields finds himself competing with Leon Errol for her hand in marriage. After the script is rejected, Fields drives away from the studio with Gloria, drops her off at a drug store, which is followed by Fields' assisting a middle-aged woman he believes to be in labor, on a mad drive through the streets over to the maternity hospital. If this lengthy car chase involving police cars and fire trucks looks familiar, much of it was reused for the Abbott and Costello comedy, IN SOCIETY (1944).Many years following the initial release of NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK, WC Fields still has loyal fans who continue to love "Uncle Bill" as Gloria Jean does in the story. Sadly, age has caught up with Fields, looking older than his 62 years, being physically heavier and reciting his lines in a slower manner than usual, but in spite of these handicaps that marked the end of his career in a leading role, Fields proves to still be capable in being funny, even through a story without a plot tied together with a series of sight gags, ranging from Fields' encounter with a snooty waitress (Jody Gilbert) in a diner, to dealing with two mischievous boy actors named Buddy and Butch (Kenneth Brown and Billy Lenhart), to one of the funniest car rides ever put on film.Soundtrack includes Gloria Jean singing "Estrellita" and Johann Strauss's "Voices of Spring," Russians singing "Ochye Tchornia" and Susan Miller doing a jive number to "Comin' Through the Rye."Others in the cast include Mona Barrie Pangborn's wife; Charles Lang as Peter Carson, the engineer; and in smaller roles, from Carlotta Monti to character actors Irving Bacon and Bill Wolfe. Anne Nagel, who appears in the opening scene as Gloria Jean's mother, Madame Gorgeous, was originally supposed to have a scene where she is killed in a trapeze fall while working in a circus film, leaving Fields as Gloria Jean's guardian, but this piece ended up on the cutting room floor, leaving no explanation in the final print to the disappearance of Gorgeous and Fields' sudden guardianship of Gloria Jean.NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK should make a good double feature with THE BANK DICK (1940) mainly due to certain similarities, such as Fields starring in both, each having the same opening and closing musical score, as well as the Fields introduction in the story as he's standing on the street looking at the billboard advertisement that reads W.C. Fields in THE BANK DICK.Of the handful of movies made throughout the 1940s to feature Gloria Jean, NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK is the only one to have survived on the television markets the longest, solely because it has WC Fields, whose comedies have become legendary. A delightful young actress/singer, Gloria Jean was quite popular in her day but as fate would have it, with each passing decade, much of her film work, mostly second features, are hardly shown anymore. Although Gloria Jean is largely forgotten by today's standards, at least there is a movie of hers to still be in circulation today, and it's this one. Available on either video cassette and/or DVD format, NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK, which formerly played on the American Movie Classics cable channel from 1995 to 1999, followed by its Turner Classic Movies debut in 2001, continues to be a funny movie as well as a confusing one. What was the story about? We'll never know for sure. Our Uncle Bill ... and we still love him. (***)
