11 Dec Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941)

Jumping Suckers We

This is possibly the last gasp of vaudevillian humour in movies, and to my mind the best beyond the early Marx brothers movies — which were just filmed acts.

But this is something quite different, firmly a film, a folded film, the kind I like.

The deal is simple. Fields at this time was an unreliable drunk whose humour was considered outdated. He could only get a movie financed if he was able to use it to feature a young actress whose presence is completed unrelated to what he wants to do.

So. Fields writes and makes a movie about what? Himself as an unreliable drunk who cannot get a movie made unless it features a young girl. A third of the movie is a traditional Fields movie, with mistaken punches, punchline gags and his obnoxious humour. A car chase.

A third of the movie is more of the same, except focused on the storyline of Fields going over his script. The producer keeps denigrating the story.

And the final third is the movie he makes, with fantastic effects.

All three of these have Fields being Fields and Gloria Jean shoehorned in, in the most intensionally jarring ways with musical numbers and endearing face shots.

Whether you like Fields’ humour is a matter of taste. I do like it because it is so honest. This isn’t an act: he really was drunk and belligerent, closing down production frequently. But whether you like the humour or not, you have to admire the way this thing is constructed. It is all about jumping among these three narrative stances, and the movie within the movie within is all based on plot devices that feature jumping among scenarios.

This was, in my opinion an influential movie in furthering the notions of folded narrative in film.

Posted in 2005

Ted’s Evaluation — 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.

IMDB