Man on the Flying Trapeze

In terms of comedic concept, this is Fields' greatest film. A seemingly minor domestic comedy about a henpecked husband, it is so well developed that most people miss the actual humor because they're probably looking for vulgar, low laughs.

The film opens with the classic "burglars in the basement" passage. Put-upon Ambrose Wolfinger (typically ridiculous Fields persona name), under the pretense of brushing his teeth (rubbing the toothbrush on the sink to ruse his shrewish wife into thinking he's making with concerted oral hygiene). His wife implores him to "please come to bed" while he's more interested in having a few nightcaps.

We learn, right off the bat, that dear Ambrose is a bit circumspect and somewhat quietly manipulative and apparently angry, but, this is a survivor's profile.

Meanwhile, the burglars (including a young Walter Brennan) break into the basement and find his cache of home-made applejack. They help themselves to a few libations and get quickly soused (must have been a wicked brew), and make more noise. Wolfinger's wife rouses him from sleep to go and investigate, and he, not being in any hurry to confront danger, does that elaborate routine while putting on his socks. When she insists that he take his gun with him, and it accidentally goes off, he's genuinely disappointed that the bullet didn't hit her. His call to the "Safety Patrol" is hilarious.

Then, after a spectacular fall down the basement steps, he starts drinking with the burglars and they become fast friends, ending up singing songs from some obscure boys' glee club from Wolfinger's past. The Safety Patrol finally shows up, and hauls Wolfinger off for making illegal hooch and the burglars get away. Ironic. Brilliant.

While in jail, there's that truly great scene of him in the cell with the homicidal maniac. One of the funniest three minutes of film ever recorded.

The bit with him eating burnt toast at the breakfast table the next morning is really great. Truly eating crow.

Then, at work as a "Memory Expert" with a filing system that's a total wreck, the satire of business can't be missed. Seeing that we're supposedly living in an "Information Age," his gross mismanagement of such is a prescient statement about the know-nothings who took over the Office World about 60 years after this film was shot.

Then, comes the central comic trope of the film, his desire to attend the wrestling matches (another present-day obsession of the slobs out there) and creating a bogus reason to take off him work during the afternoon (i.e., his priggish mother-in-law, a teetotaler, dying suddenly due to "bad alcohol"). He gets off from work for the first time in 25 years and goes to the match without a ticket because his original one was pinched by his oafish step-son.

On the way, he runs into his double-hott secretary, whose mother is apparently a good friend of one of the grapplers, Kukalaka Mishobob ("Ah, Kukalaka, didn't know his first name," Wolfinger says.), and they go into the arena together. At that point, Mishobob's opponent, "Tossoff, the Russian Giant" hurls his foe out of the ring, knocking Wolfinger to the ground. His secretary runs to his aid.

At that moment, the aforementioned step-son shows up and sees the spectacle of Wolfinger witless on the cobbles, apparently drunk, in the company of some young babe. Of course, he rushes straight home to report this.

Here you have willful and dimwitted duplicity backfiring, and false presumptions of an observer misreading a situation, which affords the ability to extend the comic conceit. This is total genius.

Meanwhile, Wolfinger's employer has contacted the newspapers about the supposed death of his mother-in-law, and notice of it shows up in the afternoon edition (remember those?) at the Wolfinger residence. Flower arrangements start showing up at the house. Obviously, the Home Front gets outraged about this.

Our Hero, thinking that he has totally gotten over, goes home, not knowing what's waiting for him there.

The structuring of all of this is masterful, and Fields' playing of it is totally right-on.

Of course, all works out well for him in the end. Although fired, his office can't operate without him operating his arcane filing system, and the firm is hoodwinked into rehiring him at a higher salary with a four-week vacation slated before he returns to work.

The final scene shows Wolfinger, his wife (who comes over to his side) and daughter going for a ride in the family car, with the mother-in-law and step-son sitting in the rumble seat during a driving rain. The true second-class pinheads get their comeuppance. Justice prevails.

The storyline of this film is absurd, but, so logical in comedic terms. Comedy is a series of mistakes that leads through a process of ensuing error that reaches a point of pain that must be endured. And, we, the observers, are totally in on the joke, but, the actors aren't.

Great film. Much more intelligent than any of that "American Pie" and Adam Sandler doo-doo that tries to pass itself off as comedy.

This is one film that most W C Fields Fans would want to buy--if it were available on video from Universal, the video source that has the deepest, darkest vaults in the video business. What Universal is not releasing (among many other Fields films) is a saga of Fields in his "Henpecked Husband" role as an office manager who has the answers to everything in the interior of his massive roll top desk. He is unappreciated by his wife, mother-in-law, and do nothing step-son, but loved by his grown daughter--a reoccuring theme in many of his movies. All he wants to do is take the afternoon off to go to the wrestling match, and being a loyal employee who does not want to offend his boss, thinks of an excuse to leave for the day. From here his day goes downhill. Does he ever see the match? Try to turn on the television and see this film, if it ever shows up on the major film "networks". Or, just pray for Universal to release this film on video. It's a great Fields film. Don't miss it if you can!

I consider this title, along with "It's A Gift", to be the best work of W.C. Fields entire career. He isn't a carnival huckster or a flim-flam man here...no top hat and double breasted suit. He's just a lower middle-class husband dealing with a lazy brother-in-law, shrewish wife and meddlesome mother-in-law. He's a classic case of what we would call today "passive-aggressive", a brow-beaten man who appears to have given up on asserting himself with his family, deferring to everyone around him, but still managing to do what he wants. I only wish he and Kathleen Howard(playing his wife) had done more than two movies together. They play off of each other wonderfully. So many hilarious set-pieces, but the breakfast table scene, with that "delightful verse by Gertrude Smotten," still ranks as my favorite.

Despite his marvelous comic con-men, who always outwits the rubes and dolts about him, there is a side of W.C. Fields that few people ever notice: he is usually a hopeless, henpecked husband when he is married. His Ambrose Wolfinger (in MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE) is probably the most helpless married man that he ever portrayed.

Ambrose has actually been married (presumably more happily) to a previous wife, who has died. But they had a little girl (now grown up) named Hope (Mary Bryan) who is his one total ally in the family. His second wife, Leona Wolfinger, née Nesselrode (Kathleen Howard) is strict and shrewish with him. And his mother in law and brother in law Claude (Grady Sutton, playing a totally disreputable liar, trouble-maker, leech, and thief for a change) make his hell total.

In this film Fields is controlled by events and people - he rarely shows any of the spunk and cleverness that his Great McGonigal or Egbert Souse or Larson E. Whipsnade show. He tries to get two burglars charged in court, but they were drinking apple jack that he had allowed to ferment, so the idiot crabby judge ignores the burglary and charges Fields with violating the prohibition laws! He tries to see a wrestling match, but is delayed by traffic problems, a tire that runs away from him, a set of traffic cops, and arrives too late to see the match, only to be knocked down by one of the wrestlers being thrown on him. To make the situation even more absurd, he did not realize this ticket was stolen by Claude, who seeing him lying on the ground sneers at him as "Drunk again!"

He is also harried by his boss (Lucien Littlefield) at work, and he has to lie to get a miserable afternoon off to see the match (he says his mother-in-law died). When the truth comes out, Littlefield (on his own - as he subsequently regrets) fires him.

This is how it goes throughout the film. Except for Mary Bryan and for his secretary (Carlotta Monti, who has a nice moment at Littlefield's expense), all of the characters use and abuse Fields. He is only finally aroused when Claude tries to slap Hope, and Fields defends her, knocking out Claude. But even after that he still seems lost regarding what to do to pick up his life.

The film is funny - witness the business about Field's filing system at the office (he's a memory expert). When the actual head of the firm (Littlefield's boss - Oscar Apfel) tries to find things without Fields around, he goes nuts with the system. Littlefield tries to defend his action, only to be told by Monti that he has libeled her by suggesting Fields and she were out together at the match. Littlefield is then informed that if he can't get Fields back he'd better start looking for a new job (in the depression).

Howard's role is curious. Like her performance in IT'S A GIFT, she is extremely strict and suspicious. At one point, when Fields is getting ready to go down and check for burglars, she is begging for him to hurry and not to forget his gun. He takes the gun out, and accidentally fires it. High strung by the situation, the shooting scares Howard into a faint - Fields looks at her and with a slight trace of hope in his voice he asks, "Are you dead?" Yet, he did marry her, and at the end, when stuck alone with her mother and brother (who won't look for work), she seems to realize that - for better or worse - Ambrose was a good provider. In the end she is reunited with him and with her step-daughter.

It is a good comedy, and if it lacks the polish of THE BANK DICK and IT'S A GIFT and THE OLD FASHIONED WAY it is still worth watching.

This was one of W.C. Fields' favorite films, and in fact was closest to his own family situation, or at least his version of it. It also reprises many of his skits worked out with the writer J.P. McEvoy, which he also replays in It's A Gift and other W.C. Fields' movies of the domestic type, like The Bank Dick.

I love this movie; it contains much of the actual W.C. Fields. The son, Claude, for example. W.C. Fields' and Hattie Fields, his wife, were estranged while their son, William Claude, Jr., grew up. Fields believed, according to biographers, including his grandson, that his wife turned his son against him. He always believed that if he'd had a daughter, she would be a more loyal child. In this movie, the son, Claude, is awful to him, while the daughter, Hope (!), is loyal and loving.

The gags fly: "How can you hurt a person by throwing him on his head?" "It must be hard to lose your mother-in-law." "Yes, it is, almost impossib-, um, yes." Or my favorite exchange, the most brilliantly poignant comment on an unhappy marriage, I think, ever portrayed in a movie. "Is your toast warm, Dad?" "No, dear, it's cold. But it's all right. I've been eating cold toast now for eight years; I like it." All the while looking as miserable as anyone ever could. God, he was brilliant.

There's also the sense that Ambrose, the character The Great Silly plays, is someone lost in a world that he doesn't understand. The scene where instead of the burglars, HE is the one sent to jail. Or the scene where he's parked in a no parking zone, and the painful exchanges with the cop, the chauffeur, etc. Or when he loses the car's wheel and chases it down the hill, over the dale, down the railroad tracks, barely escaping death twice.

His actual mistress (W.C. and Hattie, Catholics, never divorced), Carlotta Monti, plays his secretary, and is the one who explains that her mother is good friends with Hookalakah Meshobbab, somehow without howling with laughter.

Ah, what a film, and it's a disgrace that it's not on DVD yet.