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W.C. Fields welcomes a Mountie into The Gold Rush's cabin and plays a dulcimer with mittens on, twenty minutes of sweet and recondite surrealism follow. The song soothes the storm outside, it's about the wastrel son (George Chandler) who heads out to the big city ("No place for women, but pretty men go thar"), is pushed toward the eponymous brew by saloon dwellers and quelled by a Salvation Army sister "with a kick she'd learned before she had been saved." Fierce blizzards and sleds pulled by Great Danes and little dachshunds (poor Balto is consumed along the way, "mighty good with mustard"), ice cubes out of the water pump and rear-projection elk ready to be milked. Dinner with Ma (Rosemary Theby) consists of baguettes dunked into bowls of soup, in walks the lad for the mock-maudlin reunion, Pa sobs mightily through a mouthful. "It ain't a fit night out for man nor beast," snow is a blatant stage prop flung repeatedly into his face, "tastes more like cornflakes." (Reveal the wires, says Godard of Hitchcock, and "they're no longer wires, but the pillars of a marvelous architectural design made to withstand our scrutiny.") Mack Sennett production, Clyde Bruckman direction, Fields pure and weird. At the end of a long day of nougats and mukluks, the ultimate joy of throwing out the Prodigal Son. "My old embouchure ain't what it used to be." The sublime stream-of-consciousness gags sown here flower later in Kerouac's Pull My Daisy and Pinter's The Homecoming, Naked Lunch and Monty Python, etc. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |