The film I picked was You’re Telling Me!, a 1934 Paramount vehicle for W. C. Fields. Basically Fields’ movies fit into one of two categories, the “husband” movies and the “carnie” movies, and this was definitely a “husband” movie. Fields plays Samuel Bisbee, professional optometrist (though we never actually see him working as such) and amateur inventor who’s been working for 10 years to perfect his latest, and most commercially promising, invention, a totally puncture-proof car tire. He’s also got the usual battle-axe wife he had to contend with in these films, Bessie Bisbee (Louise Carter), and their nice ingénue daughter Pauline (Joan Marsh, whose winsome manner and authority when the role calls for it should have marked her for biggers and betters) has fallen in love with the son of their small town’s richest people, the Murchisons.
Her boyfriend Bob (Buster Crabbe, billed as Larry “Buster” Crabbe
before he got typecast in roles like Tarzan and Flash Gordon) is a
down-to-earth guy but his parents (Fred Sullivan and Kathleen Howard) are
insufferable status-conscious snobs; at one point Mrs. Murchison is willing to
relent and allow the marriage when she learns that Bessie Bisbee’s maiden name
was Warren and she was one of the Virginia Warrens — only to break it off again when Sam comes home
unexpectedly, rolling an automobile wheel containing his experimental tire and
acting like the down-to-earth working-class guy he is. You’re Telling Me! (the exclamation point is on the opening title card)
began as a Redbook short story in the
early 1920’s called “Mr. Bisbee’s Princess” by Julian Leonard Street (though
the magazine’s name back then was Red Book — two words); it’s unclear when the magazine first published it but
it appeared in book form as part a collection of Street’s stories, Mr.
Bisbee’s Princess and Other Stories, in
1925. Unusually for a Fields movie, he isn’t credited as a writer, either under
his own name or a pseudonym — though “Charles Bogle,” a name he commonly used
later on for his writing credits (and before that he’d used as a gag in his
stage act, drawing out the “o” in “Bogle” to unusual Fieldsian lengths),
appears on the cast list as the name of a minor character.
It’s not clear just
who thought this old story would be a suitable Fields vehicle, but he certainly
put his stamp on it even though some of the movie’s funniest scenes either were
or seemed to have been spliced in almost at random — in one sequence he’s told
that he can square things with his wife by bringing her a pet bird, and he
decides that he needs a bigger bird than his friend’s, so there are some
screamingly funny scenes in which he’s attempting to lead an ostrich down the
streets; and the writers contrive to have the film end on a golf course so
Fields can do his famous “Golf Specialist” routine, first introduced by him in
the Ziegfeld Follies of 1915 and
filmed on its own as an RKO short in 1930 (though that film presented it as it
would have been on stage, in front of a painted backdrop representing the
opening tee of a golf course, whereas here it’s filmed on an actual golf course
— or at least a reasonable simulacrum thereof on the Paramount backlot). It’s
also one of those movies whose plot resembles a bell-shaped curve, with Fields’
fortunes plummeting until at the midpoint he’s contemplating suicide — his wife
is mad at him, his daughter has broken up with her boyfriend and blames dad,
and his demonstration of the puncture-proof tire (which he tests by shooting a
gun at it, itself leading to some very bizarre black-humor gags, with Fields
telling the demonstration’s witnesses, “Stand back, the bullets bounce”) is a washout
when, unbeknownst to him, the police tow away his own car (which he’s equipped
with the special tires, but which he parked illegally) and park one of their
police cars in its place.
He slinks home on a train and is about to commit
suicide by drinking iodine (only he can’t keep his collapsible spoon from
collapsing and folding in on itself just when he’s about to raise the fatal
dose to his lips) when his deus ex machina appears in the form of Princess Maria Lescaboura (the suitably
exotic-looking Adrienne Ames), who also has a bottle of iodine out — she’s only
going to use it topically but he’s convinced she, too, is contemplating suicide
and talks her out of it. She hears out his story and takes pity on him,
insisting that her state visit to the U.S. include a stop at his town, Crystal
Springs, and where he’s finding himself the talk of the town for all the wrong
reasons — a couple of gossips saw him entering the Princess’s compartment on
the train and assumed the worst. The film ends with the Princess (who’s being
forced to marry her country’s crown prince even though she loves someone else)
rehabilitating Bisbee’s reputation, reconciling him with his wife, getting Bob
Murchison and Pauline Bisbee together and starting a bidding war with the
National Tire Company over Bisbee’s super-tire (they found Bisbee’s car where
the cops had towed it, tested the tires themselves and found they worked) and
getting him a $1 million fee plus royalties. As the Princess drives out of
town, Bisbee — convinced through all of this that she’s just an ordinary woman posing as a princess — drawls out to her, “We certainly put
that princess stuff over, didn’t we?” “You’re telling me!” she says — the only
explanation we ever get for the title.
You’re Telling Me! is one of Fields’ best movies, maybe not quite as
relentless as his other “husband” movies (The Fatal Glass of Beer, It’s a
Gift, The Man on the Flying Trapeze and The
Bank Dick) but showing off his skill as
a physical comedian as well as a verbal one — the opening is a long pantomime
sequence in which a drunk Fields comes home shortly before midnight, takes off
his shoes so as not to wake up his wife when he enters, juggles shoes and hat
and can’t get his key in the door until he uses another one of his invention, a
funnel-shaped device to aid inebriated latecomers in getting their keys in
their locks — and also showing how surprisingly agile Fields was before he
really got bloated from years of overdrinking. Frankly, it’s jarring to watch
Buster Crabbe tower over him in their scenes together! It’s yet another
indication of how much better movie comedies were in the classic era — as I’ve
noted before, maybe one could make the case that movie dramas have benefited
from the greater sexual freedom of the post-Code era, but somehow most of
today’s “comedies” offer too few good laughs and too many tasteless “jokes” to
be genuinely warm, human or funny. (The few exceptions are movies like Kabluey! that have deliberately sought to evoke older styles of
comedy.)
