The Film Junkie

I just don’t get the appeal of W.C. Fields.  He is brutish, offensive and ignorant, and not in the charming or ironic ways of Al Bundy, no Fields is just a straight up asshole.  Yet he is considered a comedy legend, when all he seems to do is drink, make mistakes and pretend to do physical comedy when it is obviously special effects.

In this film Fields plays Egbert Souse, and that last name is easily the funniest part of the film.  He makes ignorant, racist and sexist comments while looking pickled and half dead.  Certainly Fields was 60 at this point and nearing the end of his life (this was his second to last film), but he doesn’t even seem to be trying.  He can’t sell any of his lines, but stumbles over them and mumbles.

The circumstances of the plot are supposed to be funny and kooky, but they are little more than ridiculous. The women are either harpies, stiff tight asses, or overly sexualized from too young an age.  The acting from everyone is terrible, but Fields’ lameness only highlights how mediocre everyone else is.  The final car chase scene improved by rating a little, however the stuntman doesn’t make any attempt whatsoever to look like Fields, the shot goes from a slender stuntman to the bloated and huge Fields which takes you right out of the story, if you were ever there to begin with.

I just don’t get it.

Grade: D

This movie is entirely frustrating.  First off you have a strong female character (Eve Arden) who is a lawyer and seems very intelligent.  But then you discover that she has chosen to give up her career for the chance at marrying another lawyer (Roger Pryor) who doesn’t know she has such abilites.

You see, he just wants a wife, not an equal and she just wants him to love her, whatever it costs her.  Needless to say, they end up representing opposing counsel at trial and their relationship is thus tested.

The sad truth of this film is that despite the fact that Arden’s character proves herself to be a great lawyer and thus a great companion, she decides that being a wife is more important to her…

This film could have been a feminist frontrunner, like the Hepburn/Tracy classics that came later, or like ‘His Girl Friday’.  Instead, it is attempting to prove that a woman’s place is in the home and she will eventually realize that no matter what her early dreams are.

The film is badly constructed as well, we are constantly told instead of shown and it speeds along to fit into a tiny 75 minutes.  All the telling leaves little connection or substance.

If not for an intelligent, if badly ended, performance by Arden, this would be unwatchable.

Grade: C

I was really excited to see this movie, ‘The Awful Truth’ is one of my favorite movie and it also co-stars Irene Dunne and Cary Grant. However ‘Wife’ quickly falls apart under its own plot.

The film concerns a man who, after seven years, comes to terms with the fact that his wife died in a terrible shipwreck and decides to marry again. The very same day, his wife (Dunne) arrives back after being rescued from the island she was stranded on.

It relies very strongly on opposing forces to keep these two, obviously in love, people apart and these plot devices never really seem to work.

It is a delight seeing Dunne and Grant play off one another, but this is no ‘Truth’, it doesn’t come close.

Grade: B