Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY (1934)

Falling just below IT’S A GIFT/’34 and MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE/’35, this period comedy captures more of the W. C. Fields comic iconography than anything else he did @ Paramount. Playing actor/manager to a traveling group of third-rate players, Fields delivers a banquet of bad behavior, rising to every opportunity for humbug pomposity, cowardly bullying & petty swindling, whether it’s skipping out on a bill, stroking the vanity of a local amateur gargoyle or kicking Baby LeRoy in the backside. (No editing for this two-year-old trooper, but a real kick in the pants.) The film finishes off with a tab version of the old melodrama THE DRUNKARD, played & staged more-or-less straight to hilarious result. Then, a priceless encore: the Fields foundation myth, his own performing Magna Carta in an abridgement of the juggling act that carried him around the world as a young man, including the 'floating' cigar box finish, still an astonishment. And filmed just in the nick of time, barely a year before Fields faced a significant decline in his health. The director, William Beaudine, became a dreadful hack, but he also helmed two of Mary Pickford’s best late silents (LITTLE ANNIE ROONEY/’25 and the superb SPARROWS/’26). Hey, someone got Fields & Baby LeRoy to work together.

DOUBLE-BILL/SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: As the villain in THE DRUNKARD, Fields not only sports a fine elaboration of the silly mustaches he once wore on stage & screen, but also includes the immortal line from THE FATAL GLASS OF BEER/’33, ‘It ain’t a fit night out for man or beast.’ Then gets hit in the puss with a handful of hopelessly fake stage snow flakes.

No comments: