Never Give a Sucker an Even Break

The last of four films that W.C. Fields made for Universal is one wild, plot-defying ride: a freewheeling Hollywood spoof combining satire, slapstick, surrealism, and an insufferable singing moppet! Leonard Maltin calls it “completely insane”; Time Out insists it “has to be seen to be believed, an even then it probably won’t be.” Fields is at the peak of his legendary comic powers — and his legendary boozing — in what would be his last starring role (drink finally killed him in 1946). He plays an aging actor-screenwriter pitching his latest idea for a movie to Esoteric Studios. “The film quickly veers off into a comical alternate universe with side trips to a Russian colony in Mexico and a bizarre mountaintop retreat presided over by the man-eating Mrs. Hemogloben (Margaret Dumont) and her Great Dane... Fields’s legendary battles with the top brass at Universal were well documented ... The film is really a thinly disguised attack on the Hollywood studio system” (Turner Classic Movies). "A maelstrom of slapstick, song, blackout episodes, old gags, new gags, confusion. That much of it is truly comic is testimony to the fact that Fields is one of the funniest men on earth” (James Agee). B&W, 35mm. 71 mins.