Tillie and Gus (Paramount, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Recently I had broken open one of my latest DVD acquisitions – an 18-film boxed set that appears to contain all the films W. C. Fields starred in for Paramount and Universal from 1932 to 1941. I had got this largely for the film If I Had a Million, which I’d previously ordered as a stand-alone from a grey-label source that hadn’t tracked properly, so I looked for another copy and found I could get that one movie on Amazon.com for $17 while I could get the full box for just $10 more. The box overlapped in content with the two W. C. Fields Comedy Collection boxes I’d got earlier but had quite a few movies I hadn’t seen in years, including a marvelous 1933 vest-pocket movie (only 58 minutes) called Tillie and Gus of which I had fond memories when it showed up on Channel 36 in San José (which by a freak of UHF signals came in uncommonly well when I was growing up in Marin County, California just north of San Francisco) in the early 1970’s. My husband Charles had seen the list of other films on the first disc in the box and had said he’d love a chance to see the 1933 all-star comedy International House again – a great movie I’ve already commented on extensively in my moviemagg blog (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2016/01/international-house-paramount-1933.html), so all I’ll add now is it has fine comic performances not only from people you’d expect them from – Fields, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Franklin Pangborn (as – what else? – a hotel manager) – but one actor you wouldn’t: Bela Lugosi. The film is about a group of representatives from various countries who descend on Wu-Hu, China (“played” by sets recycled from Josef von Sternber’g 1932 masterpiece Shanghai Express, with Marlene Dietrich and Clive Brook) to bid on a new invention, a “radioscope” (essentially a projection TV but one that can eavesdrop on any event anywhere in the world with no need for TV cameras or broadcast signals), and Lugosi plays the Russian representative, General Nicolai Pernovsky Petronovich, as a screamingly funny comic villain. (It’s a pity he didn’t get more roles like this, but his shaky command of English – he never learned more than a few simple sentences and learned most of his parts phonetically – probably put him at a disadvantage for roles like this.)

Tillie and Gus is a fine little movie but also an odd one; the title is clearly an homage to the 1930 MGM film Min and Bill, and it seems that by casting W. C. Fields and Alison Skipworth as Augustus and Mathilde Winterbotham, they were trying to create a middle-aged man-and-woman comedy couple similar to Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler at MGM. Tillie and Gus (as they’re known throughout the film) are an estranged couple who told their niece Mary Sheridan (Jacqueline Wells, later known as Julie Bishop) they were working as missionaries, she in China and he in Alaska. In fact he’s a fugitive wanted for shooting another man over a card game – though he wins the jury’s sympathy when he claims that in the near-fatal game he was holding four aces and the victim offered five (even for a W. C. Fields movie, nine aces in a card deck is too many!), while she runs a nightclub and gambling joint in Shanghai (so once again Paramount got to recycle a set from Sternberg’s Shanghai Express) which is so popular I joked, referencing Casablanca, “Everybody comes to Tillie’s.” Unfortunately, when we meet her she’s on the point of being cleaned out by an unscrupulous gambler who brought his own pair of dice – obviously loaded, which makes me wonder why she didn’t call him out on it and make him use another pair – and rolls 7’s over and over again until he wins the place from her. Tillie and Gus meet up when they receive word that Mary’s father, John Burke (we’re never told which one was his sibling, Tillie or Gus), has just died and Tillie, Gus, Mary and her husband Tom (Phillip Trent) are all entitled to shares of the inheritance.

Only there isn’t any inheritance because John’s corrupt attorney, Phineas Pratt (the marvelous character villain Clarence Wilson), has looted it all. The only thing the Sheridans have left is a crumbling old ferryboat, the Fairy Queen, and a contract to run it on the local lake. Even that is in jeopardy because Pratt has inveigled the local authorities to cancel the contract on the ground that the Fairy Queen is not seaworthy and has offered to buy the boat for $400. What he’s really after, of course, is to operate the ferryboat contract himself, for which he’s ordered a new state-of-the-art ferry, the Keystone (one wonders if the writers were thinking of Mack Sennett’s old comedy studio) – though, like the Fairy Queen, it’s still driven by paddle wheels rather than screw propellers. Pratt challenges the Sheridans to a race between the two boats, the winner to get the contract. Tom Sheridan has trained as an engineer (though he’s unable to complete college because the inheritance he was hoping for failed to materialize) and he’s confident he can repair the boat’s engine to get it in working order if Tillie, Gus and Mary can fix the craft’s non-mechanical parts to make it worthy as a passenger vessel. There’s one scene in which Gus is trying to convince the city inspector that the Fairy Queen is operable even though one of its railings collapses and the life preserver sinks like a stone when it falls off the boat. The big race is scheduled for the Fourth of July, and of course it turns out the way you expect it to – the Fairy Queen wins (partly due to the success of Gus’s sabotage efforts against it the night before – in one of the film’s most funniest scenes he gets into a deep-sea diver’s suit to tie the boat to the dock, with Tillie there to run the hand pump that in the pre-SCUBA days was the only way divers could get air under water, only she’s discovered by the captain of the Keystone and she has to stop pumping, while the captain puts his lit pipe in front of the air vent so Gus’s diving helmet fills with tobacco smoke) and Pratt’s villainy is exposed.

But it’s the sort of film in which the fun is getting there: aside from the deep-sea diving sequence there’s also a great gag in which Gus is listening to a radio show’s instructions on how to mix paint for the home (he’s planning to repaint the boat) and the Sheridans’ bratty kid, “The King” (Baby LeRoy, in his first of three films with Fields), changes the station to an exercise program. (With those paddle-wheeled steamers and overall air of nostalgia, the only thing that gives away that this film takes place in its 1933 present is this radio gag.) There’s also a goose that runs in, around and through the action, and late in the movie in which Baby LeRoy’s portable bathtub falls overboard during the big ferry race I was half expecting the goose to grab its rope and swim it to shore – only instead Tillie and Gus bail from the boat and use a life raft to rescue the kid, leaving Tom on the boat to feed fuel to the boiler and Mary to steer. Of course, Gus has inadvertently dumped all the boat’s remaining wood, so in desperation Mary pushes boxes of fireworks down to Tom (it was the Fourth of July, after all!) and Tom feeds them into the boiler, resulting in sparks that blind the captain and pilot of the Keystone and allow the Fairy Queen to catch up and win the race. Tillie and Gus is an intriguing movie, largely due to its director, Francis Martin, who was mainly a writer (he has a co-writing credit on this film as well, with Walter DeLeon as his collaborator and Rupert Hughes, Howard Hughes’ uncle, as author of the “original” story). Martin was mostly a writer – his last fiction film credit was in 1942, though he worked on two documentaries about unidentified flying objects in the early 1950’s and lived until 1979) – and imdb.com lists 16 credits for him as a director, but this is his only even marginally feature-length directorial effort.

It’s actually quite well directed, including an elaborate moving-camera shot in the early going (at a time when directors and cinematographers were publicly feuding over moving-camera shots and cinematographers were demanding their elimination because they were allegedly too hard to keep in focus) that was quite rare in a “B” comedy from 1933. It’s also a movie I’ve long loved because Alison Skipworth was a perfect foil for W. C. Fields, essentially a female version of him, who could keep up with him both as a roguish villain and a battler on the side of good (the way Marie Dressler had been in her MGM films with Wallace Beery which Paramount was clearly trying to emulate with Tillie and Gus). Skipworth is one of my all-time favorite character players, largely on the basis of her three films with Fields (If I Had a Million, Tillie and Gus, Six of a Kind) as well as Strictly Unconventional – a 1930 adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s play The Circle, in which she played a middle-aged woman who 30 years ago left her husband to run off with her lover, and since then has had a life with him as dull as she would have had if she’d stayed with her husband – and Satan Met a Lady, the 1936 version of The Maltese Falcon (made five years after the first film of it, with Roy Del Ruth directing and Ricoardo Cortez, Bebe Daniels and Dudley Digges as the star; the famous Maltese Falcon, with John Huston directing and Hymphrey Bogart, Mary Astor and Sydney Greenstreet, was the third version, made in t941), in which the character of Casper Gutman was changed into a woman, Skipworth played her and provided one of the few bright spots in a pretty dreary movie. Also, Baby LeRoy isn’t as obnoxious here as he was in his later films with Fields, The Old-Fashioned Way and It’s a Gift (where he was so much an attraction the opening title read “W. C. Fields in IT’S A GIFT with Baby LeRoy”), though Tillie and Gus is the source for one of Fields’ most iconic lines: asked, “Do you like children?,” he matter-of-factly mutters back, “I do if they’re properly cooked.”