It's a Gift (1934)

Film: It's a Gift (1934)
Stars: WC Fields, Kathleen Howard, Jean Rouverol, Tom Bupp, Baby LeRoy
Director: Norman Z. McLeod
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

What a joy to see a movie in theaters that you normally never would.  I recently had a delightful evening at the Heights Theater, an historic movie house in Minnesota that was built in 1926.  The theater plays first-run pictures, but seems to specialize in retro screenings, and added a bit of pomp to my festivities by not only having a local film fan talk about his personal experiences meeting the family of WC Fields, but also having a Wurlitzer Pipe organ playing before the commencement of the film, and featuring three WC Fields juggling shorts prior to the main curtain rising on It's a Gift, one of the most important classic films I'd never seen before.  I had, in fact, never seen WC Fields in anything despite countless parodies and visages of him in cartoons I've spotted, so it was a fine evening to be introduced to such an important early cinematic comedian.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie features Fields as Harold Bissonette, a curmudgeonly grocery store owner whose wife Amelia (Howard) has visions of grandeur for their lives (where they live in near-poverty) after Harold's uncle dies, leaving him his money.  Harold, though, wants to pursue his dream of owning an orange ranch, which he buys sight-unseen, only learning later that the land that they've bought is basically worthless with a dilapidated shack on the property.  Harold lucks out in the final moments of the film, though, when he sells the worthless land for a fortune to a developer who needs the property "at any price."  Shot at the depths of the Depression, this had to have been the fantasy of every "Harold Bissonette" in the country at the time, trying desperately to make their lives happy for their family in the worst of conditions.

The movie is less a story and more a series of comic shorts strung together with a flimsy plot.  The movie has multiple set pieces used as excuses for Fields to do some of his best mumbling bits.  The best of these is the one where Harold, cast outside to sleep on his porch swing, is tormented by the neighbors, including Baby Dunk (LeRoy) who is throwing grapes at the man.  Fields famously hated Baby LeRoy in real life, and begrudged the young actor stealing laughs from him on films like It's a Gift (if you look at vintage posters of the movie, LeRoy shares top billing with Fields on the film), but you don't see that in his performance, where he does quite well opposite the child star.

The problem for me is it's hard to grade such a film since on-its-merits its not a great movie, and the reasons that make it a classic are hard to praise eight decades after-the-fact.  Fields' comedy was revolutionary, and it's still funny, but the movie itself is only the sum of these physical slapstick pieces, and in many ways it sort of feels like if Adam Sandler had been a comedic genius...but still chose to focus on low-grade films.  I'm going to go with, therefore 3-stars as I understand the history of this and there are genuinely amusing bits, particularly the ones surrounding Fields & Baby LeRoy, but by-and-large this is the sort of movie that was a classic, but now just needs to be respected rather than enjoyed.  The Heights Theater, however, puts on a fine show & you should make sure to patronize it in the future (I know I will).