W.C. Fields' It's a Gift was not very well received upon its release in 1934. One critic cracked that the film looked "as though it had taken two days to make, had cost $100, and had been photographed with one of the early Biograph cameras."

Directed by Norman Z. McLeod, who had just directed two Marx brothers movies, It's a Gift, like another vilified film from the time, Duck Soup -- owes its essence to vaudeville sketches honed to perfection. It's a Gift was adapted from J.P. McEvoy's Broadway play The Comic Supplement, which also starred Fields. McEvoy's play became the basis for several domestic comedies starring Fields at Paramount in the mid-'30s -- The Man on the Flying Trapeze and It's the Old Army Game being the others. The McEvoy domestic hellhole comedies were later reconstituted by Fields at Universal for his last great film, The Bank Dick. What may have seemed in the early 1930s to be anarchic drivel has gathered staying power through the years and has now achieved the status of a classic.

It's a Gift may well be Fields' best film. In this virtually plotless gem cobbled together from a succession of set pieces, Fields stars as Harold Bissonette from Wappinger Falls, New Jersey. Bissonette barely gets through a day without being put through the wringer by his nagging nightmare of a wife, played by the great Kathleen Howard. Bissonette must undergo a tortuous breakfast with his loving family as Mrs. Bissonette harangues him ("You have absolutely no consideration for anybody but yourself. I have to get up in the morning and get breakfast ready for you and the children. I have no maid, you know!"). As Bissonette fruitlessly tries to eat, his children snigger and taunt him. After his son badgers him and sarcastically taunts, "What's the matter? Don't you love me anymore?" Bissonette raises his arm to hit the kid, and his wife intervenes, shouting, "Don't you strike that child!" Fields responds, "Well, he's not going to tell me I don't love him."

As if his family weren't enough to drive a man to drink, there's also his job running a grocery store. First he has to deal with an idiot assistant and then an irate customer demanding cumquats. The work day takes a darker turn with the spectacular entrance of Mr. Muckle (Charles Sellon) -- a nasty, ill-tempered, blind and deaf codger ("the house detective over at the Grand Hotel," Bissonette quips) who ultimately wrecks Bissonette's store. Bissonette helpfully leads Mr. Muckle out of his store and into oncoming traffic.

Taking the day off after having his store destroyed, poor Bissonette can't even take a nap on his back patio, what with baby Leroy dropping sharp ice picks down a hole in the floor above Bissonette and almost stabbing him in the head, or an obnoxious insurance salesman looking for a Mr. Carl LaFong (Captial "L," small "a," captial "F," small "o," small "n," small "g").

Fields plays these comic sketches with the grace, ease, and throwaway charm of a master, and McLeod does his duty by framing the shots so that Fields can dominate the frame and that no bits of monkey business are lost.

The film hasn't aged one bit since 1934 and, perhaps, looked older in 1934 than it does today. It peels with a Seinfeldian "about nothing" attitude that is, in fact, about everything -- particularly for put-upon men of a certain age who can feel the anguish of Bissonette in their very souls as marriage, family, and the drudgeries of life consume the marrow of their beings.

But there is a strain of optimism in the film, succinctly told by Bissonette after an irate character declares that Bissonette is drunk: "Yeah? And you're crazy. I'll be sober tomorrow, and you'll be crazy for the rest of your life!"



Capital W. Capital C.