82: It's a Gift*

USA  73m  Dir: Norman McLeod  Key Cast: W.C. Fields

For only the second time in my journey so far I've reached a film which doesn't appear to be available in the UK and I can't afford the cost of getting a copy shipped over from America. The plan is that if and when I ever reach the end of this challenge I will go back and seek out the missing films, which may well have been released here by that point. 

In the meantime, I've done the next best thing which was to read up on the film and watch as many clips of it as I could. Fortunately every piece on the film seems to list two or three scenes as key moments and it's these moments that are clipped on YouTube so I feel like I've seen a decent highlights package of the film. 

It's a Gift is a W.C. Fields film. Here Fields plays Harold Bissonette who is essentially the same character as the comic always played- a misanthropic egotist who managed to remain sympathetic despite an apparent contempt for children and dogs. 

The plot see Harold begin as the owner of a general store and then give it up to move to California to run an orange ranch, much to his family's disdain, only to discover the land is useless. From what I can tell thought the plot is largely irrelevant- the film was put together using routines that Fields had honed for many years, converting stage skits onto film and adding a loose narrative to connect them. It's hard to judge without seeing the film but it would appear that the plot just about works despite not being the main focus of the film. 

The skits are genuinely great. There's a sequence when a blind and hard of hearing man enters Harold's shop and inadvertently wrecks half of it, much to Harold's frustration. All the way through another customer keeps demanding kumquats which just adds to the frantic mayhem. There's another sequence when Harold is attempting to shave but his daughter enters the bathroom and he struggles around her as she keeps bashing him just as he has a razor to this throat. One further sequence, which appears to be one of Fields' most famous, sees him attempting to sleep on the porch outside his house but is continually woken by an array of noisy items which is expertly put together. Fields' brand of humour feels quite similar to Chaplin's- it's mostly not about jokes and though it's physical comedy it's more than just falling over, it's a well choreographed and set-up sequence of events. 

The second billed actor in the film is somewhat surprising- it's "Baby LeRoy" who it turns out was literally a baby actor who was the youngest person to ever be put under term contract by a major studio. In two years he appeared in nine films, three alongside Fields, and never appeared in another again after that. LeRoy certainly had the cute factor and the shtick that the child would do things like drop a watch in water or flick food on Fields' face (this scene was in The Old Fashioned Way) and he would be utterly furious about. It appears that Fields genuinely disliked the child with director Norman McLeod saying "he not only hated infants in general, but he believed that Baby LeRoy was stealing scenes from him... He used to swear at the baby so much in front of the camera that I sometimes had to cut off the ends of the scenes in which they appeared".

All in all, It's a Gift appears to be an example of a gifted comic delivering some of his best material. Whether it entirely comes together as a story is difficult to gauge without having seen the whole film but one thing's for sure, the skits are brilliant.