You’re Telling Me!
Directed by Erle C. Kenton
1934/USA
Paramount Pictures
First viewing
Sam Bisbee: Stand clear and keep your eye on the ball!
When he is not drinking liquor out of a jug, Samuel Bisbee (W.C. Fields) is an optometrist and inventor who embarrasses his long-suffering wife no end. His daughter is in love with the son of a society family (Buster Krabbe) but they are having none of Sam. Sam’s hopes are further dashed when he screws up the sales presentation of his puncture-proof tire. Luckily, Sam meets a princess who solves all his problems.
The plot, such as it is, only gets in the way of the gags. Chief among these is a reprise of Fields’s golf routine from his 1930 short “The Golf Specialist”. Fields is hit and miss with me and, unfortunately, this was a miss. I smiled a few times but I didn’t laugh.
Clip – the golf routine
That is exactly the problem with fields. His gags seem tired from reuse and it is almost too obvious that the storyline only serves as a vehicle from them. I have seen an entire boxset of his films and really I cannot tell one from the other.
Unfortunately, I have two more films of his to watch from 1934! One is It’s a Gift, which is at least a List film and the other is The Old-Fashioned Way. I don’t have high hopes but I will forge my way through.