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Mark Twain's Huck Finn never did get to "light out for the Territory ahead of the rest," instead he wrestled and boozed and morphed into W.C. Fields as Ambrose Wolfinger. One night and one day with the bulbous widower and a houseful of spongy relatives make for a plangent anti-Cult of Domesticity symphony, in the first movement the wife (Kathleen Howard) nags operatically while he gargles liquor in the bathroom. The burglars in the cellar grow nostalgic on applejack and warble "On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away," the police officer joins them and then Fields, who for his trouble ends up sharing a cell with a fulminating murderer. Bailed out by his daughter (Mary Brian), he staggers back to bed and his alarm clock rings five seconds after his head hits the pillow, "quite a snooze." Fields himself took over direction from Clyde Bruckman, the result is his most caustic snapshot of middle-class asphyxiation and homegrown outlandishness. Henpecked at home, at work and before the Court of Justice, the hero can either learn to enjoy cold toast at the breakfast table or metaphorically kill his sourpussed mother-in-law (Vera Lewis) and sneak off to the wrestling match. "It must be hard to lose your mother-in-law." "Yes it is, very hard. Almost impossible." Sets as bare and seedy as Psycho's, gags of sublime excruciation—the long-take socks routine (the husband methodically takes them off, blows into them, folds them into his slippers, then reverses the process) is rhymed in the stalled-car sequence and its multiple police tickets for deeply cinematic rhythms. "The more haste, the less speed." Fassbinder in Why Does Herr R. Run Amok pushes the comedy to its logical limit, Fields settles for punching Grady Sutton's lights out. With Lucien Littlefield, Oscar Apfel, Tammany Young, Walter Brennan, and Carlotta Monti. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |