Six of a Kind

Three zany couples, all SIX OF A KIND, become entangled in a madcap search for stolen bank loot.

This is a lively, hilarious comedy, with the six stars - Charlie Ruggles & Mary Boland, W. C. Fields & Alison Skipworth, George Burns & Gracie Allen - all heartily engaged in doing what they did best: getting laughs.

Ruggles & Boland make another of their film appearances as husband & wife - this time rather more amorous than usual. They were a perfect team - she the strident lioness, he the nervous rabbit - and they dominate most of the screen time here. From beginning to end, they are a delight.

Burns & Allen continue the patter they originated in Vaudeville, perfected on radio & would eventually take to television, with George the perpetual straight man & Gracie the eternal fool. At times in the film she tends to go a bit over the top, but it's difficult to dislike her. Her heart was obviously made of solid gold.

While Skipworth is given rather short shrift - only fragments of her formidable personality flash through - Fields is in his element as the disreputable sheriff of Nuggetville, Nevada. Whether explaining how he got the nickname ‘Honest John' or skulking about at night looking for the missing moola, he is never less than wonderful. Best of all, he gets to perform his entire classic pool routine, preserving it forever for a grateful posterity. Finally, he executes the near miraculous - he gets Gracie to shut up.

Paramount was so pleased with the success of SIX OF A KIND that they wanted to hurry the principle players into another comedy. Only Fields demurred. He felt he had now arrived at the point where he no longer needed to share a movie with other celebrity comics. The Studio finally agreed and began preparation of Fields' first solo starring feature, YOU'RE TELLING ME (1934).

The idea in this is to take three comedy teams and combine them in one movie. The gimmick is that these represent three radically different types of humor. What happens usually is people find some things funny and ignore the others. Scan through these IMDb comments and you will see grace fall on different players in this.

The Fields poolplaying routine is priceless. I've seen it before but cannot recall where. But its inserted into this project without reference to anything else. Incidentally, it works as well as it does because there is a watcher in the frame, a deadpan face that is every bit as valuable and practiced as the actor.

That's indicative of how the experiment fails as a whole. If you know "Mad Mad Mad World," you'll know a successful example where comedic methods actually do bump up against each other and generate something resonant, rich, higher.

In this case however, the comedic models take turns. Isn't as effective.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

The plot's pretty lame, George and Gracie are okay (a few shining moments, but nothing spectacular), and the jokes aren't all that outstanding, but there is a five minute sequence with W.C. Fields attempting to shoot pool that is one of the funniest five minutes ever put to celluloid. I howled at this scene as I have rarely howled at anything in my life. The entire movie is worth a watch for this scene alone.

But George and Gracie's are not among them. The movie is fun and the pool table scene with WC Fields has to be among the funniest I have ever seen but Gracie and George are more irritating than comical in their roles, partly from script deficiency and partly from their interpretation. I gave it a 7 out of 10 for the rest of the cast, WC is a treasure of comedic timing and energy in this one.

It is not always certain that by mixing comedians together you will produce laughter. The comics involved have to actually like or admire each other, or be willing to put up with each other's crankiness. GO WEST with the Marx Brothers had Buster Keaton write the script as a gag man. Groucho did not think too highly of Keaton's ideas, and embarrassed him at a script meeting. And though some of Keaton's gems still appear in the finished film (such as the gun that turns into a brush that turns into a gun) the film was one of the weakest the Marx Brothers ever made.

A better film, but also affected by dueling comic egos, was W.C. Fields and Mae West in MY LITTLE CHICKADEE, which jettisoned the script for a series of duels of one liners between the leads. But the one liners were equally funny, so the film remains a success.

But SIX OF A KIND is an example of six film comics who worked well together. The reason is simple: it is really three comic teams working together: Charlie Ruggles and Mary Boland, George Burns and Gracie Allan, and W.C. Fields and Alison Skipworth. Ruggles and Boland were paired in about half a dozen comedies during the 1930s, usually with Boland as a somewhat bossy wife, and Ruggles as a nervous wreck of a husband. Fields (usually a single act) was paired three times with Skipworth (TILLY AND GUS and IF I HAD A MILLION were the other two times). Skippy always figured out how to control or counter the larcenous activities of her man - it the present film she takes action into her own hands with the stolen money that is being searched for (she knows that the local sheriff, Fields, is not the one to trust with this). As for Burns and Allan they manage to effortlessly involve themselves with the put upon Ruggles and Boland on their cross-country trip by car.

Ruggles quickly gets to realize what a mistake it was to agree to travel with Gracie - at one point she manages to cause him to fall off a cliff, and dangle from a branch. He is relatively helpless when she insists on 1) photographing him on his perch, and 2) correcting his grammar. The presence of George and Gracie's humongous dog ("Ran Tang Tang" is it's name) does not make travel arrangements easier for Charlie and Mary.

Fields has some choice moments. When he insists on shouting at the quartet, he says he's allowed to do so - he's the sheriff! He also explains, during a pool game, the improbable story of how he got his undeserved moniker "Honest John". You have to listen carefully to the tale, as it is interrupted with his attempts to play pool a few times (once getting accidentally beaned by a billiard ball), but it does show that there were items that even Fields would have had no reason to steal.

Oh, in the "Summary Line", I mentioned a forgotten actor named Bradley Page - he was the man who is responsible for the trouble that Charley Ruggles is suspected of. Bradley has to have a reason to leave town in order to catch up with the unwary Ruggles and Boland, so he telephones his girl friend. He tells her to call back his job and say that he has to leave town because somebody has died. There is a pause as he apparently hears a question shot back by the girlfriend. "ANYBODY!", he says - clearly annoyed. Although the bulk of the humor in the film is carried by the sextet of performers, Mr.Page happened to have the most amusingly unexpected line in the film.