Six of a Kind (Paramount, 1934)

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

Last night I ran my husband Charles and I another item from the 18-film W. C. Fields boxed set, Six of a Kind, a quirky 1934 Paramount film directed by Leo McCarey (whom the studio had lured over from Hal Roach Productions, where he’s first teamed Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy and either directed or produced their first films). McCarey was the director of the Marx Brothers’ greatest film, Duck Soup (1933) – which bombed at the box office and only found its audience in the 1960’s, when countercultural youth embraced its satire of war, dictators and all authority. In 1934 he got to direct Paramount’s biggest star, Mae West, in a typical vehicle called Belle of the Nineties, only the push for movie censorship and tighter enforcement of the Production Code caught this film and it was eviscerated by the censors (including the quite obvious deletion of one verse of West’s song “When a St. Louis Woman Comes Down to New Orleans”). That year he also directed Six of a Kind, an all-star comedy built around three couples: Charles Ruggles and Mary Boland, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and W. C. Fields and Alison Skipworth. The plot of this committee-written script (Keene Thompson and Douglas MacLean, story; Walter DeLeon and Harry Raskin, script) deals with long-time married couple J. Pinkham Whinney (Ruggles) and his wife Flora (Boland), who to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary have got a two-week vacation from Ruggles’ job as a lower-level executive with the Second National Bank and plan to spend it driving cross-country to California. Where they’re starting from is never all that clear, but the first stop on the Whinneys’ itinerary – “The Glenn Falls Hotel in Glenn Falls” – is because Mr. Whinney tells it to everyone he meets, including his co-workers.

Unfortunately, without telling her husband, Mrs. Whinney has advertised for another couple to accompany them on the journey “to save expenses,” and the other couple are George Edwards (Burns) and Gracie Devore (Allen). The trip quickly turns into a comic disaster as George and Gracie bring a large dog on the trip – the dog insists on sitting in the front seat next to Mr. Whinney despite his understandable desire to have his wife next to him instead (the dog growls menacingly when Whinney tries to get him to move) – and get them to detour from Glen Falls to Parkerville. They also destroy the Whinneys’ chances for a “second honeymoon” because it turns out that they’re not really married (ironically, George and Gracie are the only couple in the movie who actually were married), which means that Mr. Whinney has to sleep with George and Flora has to sleep with Gracie. Unbeknownst to any of the four, the authorities are looking for Whinney because they suspect him of embezzling $50,000 from the bank – the real culprit is his co-worker Ferguson (Bradley Page), who stole the money to lavish it on his mistress Goldie (Grace Bradley, doing a nicely understated performance as the greedy woman instead of vamping Harlow-style all across the screen), only he swapped suitcases with Whinney so Whinney has unknowingly become his “mule.” Along the way Gracie repeatedly mispronounces Whinney’s name – he becomes “Binney,” “Tinney” and just about every consonant in the language except the correct one – and delivers her usual non sequiturs, including one of her most famous lines: she announces to George that her niece has three feet. When George’s eyebrows go up the way they always did when Gracie was feeding him a line, he asks, “Three feet?” She explains that she got a letter from her brother saying, “You wouldn’t recognize your niece. She’s grown another foot!” (It also has one of W. C. Fields’ most iconic lines: when Skipworth chews him out over his drinking, he snarles, “According to you, everything I like is either illegal, immoral or fattening!”)

Gracie also puts Flora Whinney through a series of reducing exercises even though both she and her husband are fine with her body the way it is (an interesting anticipation of the current epidemic of “body shaming” that has accelerated prejudice against large people and the plethora of expensive diet regimens being offered to shrink them), and she decides she wants to document Flora “before” and “after.” Unfortunately, she chooses to do this while the couples are staying at a rustic lodge overlooking what appears to be the Grand Canyon, and as Gracie has Flora back up for the photo, Flora falls off the ledge and is caught in a tree growing out of the canyon wall just below them. Leonard Maltin, in his chapter on Burns and Allen from the book Movie Comedy Teams, thought this film went wrong at that point because, by jeopardizing the life of one of the other characters, “Gracie becomes an annoying, unsympathetic character, and it is up to W. C. Fields, with his classic poolroom routine, to salvage the film.” Maltin also wrote that it was Ruggles’ character, not Boland’s, whose life was in danger – though at the end, after he and George have laboriously pulled Flora to safety using the strap they were using to hold their suitcases to the car (the large one that’s the Whinneys’ own and the small one that’s really the embezzler’s), Mr. Whinney takes the same fall off the same ledge into the same tree, and McCarey cuts away without telling us how he got out. Fields and Skipworth enter the action when the other two couples stop in a small town in Nevada. Whinney reads the sign but Gracie announces that she doesn’t trust signs. Instead she insists on waking two people who are sleeping on the ground to ask them for directions – and the two turn out to be robbers who relieve the travelers of all their money and valuables.

They’re supposed to be staying at the hotel owned by Mrs. K. Rumford (Skipworth); Fields is John Hoxley, the town sheriff, and he discovers the embezzled money but tries to steal it himself. Rumford stops him and insists on taking it to the nearest larger town for “safe-keeping,” and, broke, Whinney calls the bank where he works and asks them to wire him $50. Needless to say, the executives are shocked that after stealing $50,000 from them he has the gall to call them collect and ask for even more money, but fortunately Rumford actually has stashed the stolen money somewhere else and Hoxley has, totally inadvertently, locked up the real embezzler. Though the presentation of Fields’ pool routine is disappointing because it’s cut so short – one has to go back to his very first film, Pool Sharks (1915), to see the whole thing (including a trick pool table with secret pathways under the felt that guided the balls and could be made to sink all 15 balls at one shot) – and also it suffers from Fields’ nondescript character name and little, if any, of his own grandiloquent dialogue writing, Six of a Kind is a very funny movie even though the canyon scene is one of those sequences that makes you laugh but also makes you feel guilty for doing so. It even has a nice ending – the bank’s detectives recover the money and take custody of Ferguson, and Whinney’s boss wires him not only money but permission to extend his vacation 30 days so he and Flora can have the “second honeymoon” they wanted. There’ve been plenty of movies since about vacations that go hideously wrong – Honeymoon Hotel, The Out-of-Towners and National Lampoon’s Vacation and its endless progeny of sequelae and there were no doubt quite a few before this one, but as the second of two movies featuring W. C. Fields, George Burns and Gracie Allen, it can’t help but be funny.