The best comedians don’t have an act, they are the act. 1934’s It’s a Gift is a brilliant example of this principle and of WC Fields’s approach to comedy. As a film it’s not always funny but he always is, every grimace and muttered aside comedy gold.
This time around the Fields persona – a useless, drunken curmudgeon with the world against him – is a family man this with a wife, son and daughter, none of whom give him any respect. “I am the master of this household,” he says to his daughter at one point, but quietly so his wife doesn’t hear him.
Harold Bissonette (his wife prefers the pronunciation Bisson-aye) quietly has a plan. With his old Uncle Bean ailing and obviously on the way out, Harold plans to assert himself and buy an orange farm when his inheritance comes through. His wife is against the idea. Harold, she points out, can’t even run the family grocery store without making a mess of things.
And that’s it. A bit of family life, a few scenes set in the store, before Harold packs everyone off to California and a new life, where things don’t turn out quite as expected.
It’s often said that Fields, primarily a stage comedian, isn’t that well represented on screen, but It’s a Gift is a hefty part of the counter-argument. (It was his fifth film of 1934, so where this argument comes from in the first place is puzzling.) It’s full of stage moments, and whole chunks of material worked out in front of audiences are transposed wholesale onto the screen, with Fields not worrying at all if it looks like he’s going into one routine after another – Harold Bissonette shaving with a cut-throat razor. Harold trying to stop a blind man running amok at the grocery store. The central sequence where Harold tries to get some sleep on a swing seat on the balcony and the world conspires to stop him. Trying to set up a deck chair. A tangle with a dog and a feather pillow – and on they go, with Fields throwing in typical Fields business (messing about with his straw hat or cigar, for instance) as palate-cleansers in between.
Thanks to restoration work the film looks great but also sounds good – sound quality on 1930s movies is wildly variable – and gives us a better appreciation of Fields’s supporting players, with standouts including Kathleen Howard as his endlessly disapproving and highly vocal wife (Sample dialogue: “What kind of tomfoolery are you up to now?”), Tommy Bupp as the weirdly wired son always outsmarting his dad and Charles Sellon as Mr Muckle, the blind (and pretty deaf) man unaware that he’s taking Bissonette’s grocery store apart.
Bissonette is a boozer but it isn’t the central strut of his character, as so often with Fields. He’s a bit of a loser but not a total failure and here he is at least trying to do the right thing rather than trying to avoid any involvement with everyday life.
It’s often said that It’s a Gift is the best showcase of Fields, which isn’t quite the same as saying it’s his best film. The Bank Dick is more coherent as a drama. Though it’s also really just a string of sketches The Bank Dick joins them up are more convincingly. Here, there’s even a break for a musical number, another reminder that vaudeville is where Fields is coming from.
The director is Norman Z (for Zenos) McLeod, who had a knack for directing showcase-level comedy – The Secret Life of Walter Mitty with Danny Kaye, Horse Feathers for the Marx Brothers, The Paleface for Bob Hope – and he does here for Fields what he’d later do for the others: stays right out of the way and lets the talent do its thing.
It’s a Gift – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
It’s a Gift (as part of the WC Fields Comedy Collection box set )– Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
