Tillie and Gus

Sometimes it takes a crook to catch a crook. Thus enter TILLIE AND GUS Winterbottom, charlatans both, come to the rescue of their niece who's been cheated out of her inheritance by a shyster lawyer.

Alison Skipworth & W. C. Fields are a wonderful team in this little comedy, full of slapstick and verbal wisecracks. Eventually partnered in three films at Paramount - IF I HAD A MILLION (1932); TILLIE AND GUS (1933); SIX OF A KIND (1934); their characters only appeared together for a few seconds at the banquet climax of ALICE IN WONDERLAND (1933) - they played off each other beautifully. Theirs is one of the great unsung comedic duos in screen history.

Fields is terrific, as always. His two great scenes - the poker game & the paint mixing debacle - are played with great aplomb. Watching him handily defeat lesser crooks than himself is a real treat, whether it's the three cardsharps or the sour old lawyer. Never deigning to smarten up a chump, he is surprisingly warm with Baby LeRoy, in their first screen encounter. Always fascinating, never dull, W. C. Fields is secure in his place as the American cinema's greatest curmudgeon.

The formidably talented Skipworth (1863-1952), English born & bred, usually played comic, cultured ladies. Seventeen years older than Fields (unlike Tillie Winterbottom, she was not born in 1881), she was 70 the year she made TILLIE AND GUS. With her massive presence and clarion voice, she was an agile match for Fields' well known scene stealing techniques. Easily the most significant of all his movie matrons, it is unfortunate that today she is remembered primarily for her films with Fields, and not for the rest of her splendid work.

Julie Bishop & Phillip Trent do nicely as the young couple. Since they are already wed & with baby when the film commences there are no unnecessary romantic complications for the plot to deal with. Old Clarence Wilson once again does very well as an acid tongued villain. George Barbier is quaintly befuddled as the rival boat captain. And in his one scene as a harassed judge, Edgar Kennedy runs his hilarious slow burn around the block one more time.

The ferry boat race with which the film climaxes - the Fairy Queen versus the Keystone - is well produced, with elements of hilarity & suspense equally mixed into the sequence.

Before TILLIE AND GUS, W. C. Fields had already appeared in five talking full-length films, but always as one of the featured players. With this picture, the Paramount bosses felt he was at last ready to co-star in a movie, although he & Alison Skipworth still receive below the title billing. After a few more films Fields would begin to solo star in a series of comedy classics.

"Tillie and Gus" is a must-see early Paramount effort by the great W.C. The Great Man is in top form, and is ably aided by Ms. Skipworth. I recently purchased the DVD of this film, and was taken aback during a quick sequence within the courtroom scene in the early part of the film. It has been noted, and can be verified upon viewing, that Edgar Kennedy let slip the "s" word, when uttering the exclamation "oh sh*t" in the Laurel & Hardy short, "A Perfect Day" and unless I'm mistaken, he utters the magic word much more blatantly during the courtroom scene in "Tillie and Gus" in which Kennedy plays the judge. Unless my ears deceive me, the exchange between High Card Harrington, the Judge and Gus goes: High Card: "Six shots" The Judge: "Six sh*ts" Gus: "Six Cigars." Everyone, please take a look at this scene and see if you hear what I heard! I watched it ten times in a row, and still can't believe it.

"Tillie And Gus" is a "Sleeper" for W.C. Fields. It is not one of his movies that he is best remembered for, but it has several components that make it a great curiosity. First of all, Fields is teamed up again with Alison Skipworth, the craggy character actress, who in her earlier stage career in England was known to be a great beauty. She is also as far as I'm concerned, Fields' greatest female co-star. She interacts with him well as she did in "If I Had A Million" and "Six of A Kind". The two are formerly man and wife in this saga, working as "missionaries" on different locations who are found out for their flim-flam ways and sent packing back home where they are summoned to the dockside of a niece, her husband and infant son (Baby Leroy), who are being swindled out of their inheritance by shyster lawyer Phineas Pratt. The niece owns a run-down riverboat, threatened to be put in mothballs by a newer boat. A race is run to determine which boat has superiority over the other, and who keeps the river franchise. Fields' and Skipworth's goals is to help win the race, receive the money to thwart Pratt, and to kick the bum out! Memorable scenes include The "Missionaries" working together to refix a poker game on the train to their benefit, and Fields' memorable line to the question "You like children?". "Only if they are properly cooked", he says. This film is seldom seen on television and never seen as a video. The rights to this and many other Fields' films are buried in the vaults of Universal Pictures. It should be released for all of us to see again.

Tillie and Gus was the last film directed by Francis Martin. Alison Skipworth and W C Fields star in this tale of two swindlers who have come to help out their family after a relative has died. In this, we get to see a lot of Fields' tricks with props - the hat and cane bits, cards, rolling the coin along his knuckles. And of course, he teams up with Clarence Wilson (the lawyer) again, from several of his previous films. Gotta love the "make your own paint" bit, when he adds in a scoop of lead, (which we now know is poisonous when ingested) as directed by the radio host. Did people really mix up their own paint ?? Baby LeRoy steals the show once again (Fields would make four movies with him-- has an interesting bio on IMDb). In Tillie and Gus, it all comes down to the big race to see who gets the job as ferryboat for the town. While quite a good, plain, fun, simple story, it's not the usual hilarious, non-stop antics that we see in some of the other W C Fields flicks.

A light comedy, certainly, not on par with Fields' classics such as The Bank Dick, It's a Gift, and That Old-Fashioned Way, but Tillie and Gus is still a fine 1930s comedy. And Fields is in top form, with several great set pieces - a crooked card game, making paint, and throwing firewood down to the boiler room. Alison Skipworth is also quite good. The only major disappointment is Baby LeRoy, who, in his first pairing with Fields, was probably just too young. He's still cute and mischievous, but he and Fields never go at it in the same way as they do in That Old-Fashioned Way and It's a Gift. Even more creepy is the fact that Baby LeRoy's voice had to be dubbed, probably because he wouldn't make the required noises. This makes him seem like the antichrist - even more so. 8/10