The Fatal Glass of Beer

With an effective blend of the subtle and the outlandish, this comedy is one of the most memorable and distinctive of W. C. Fields's short movies. It works well both as a spoof of movie-making techniques (especially from, but hardly limited to, the old melodramas), and also as a showcase for Fields's array of comic skills. There is the silly song about "The Fatal Glass of Beer", plenty of sight gags, the recurring "ain't a fit night out" gag, and more.

It all works even better when you watch it over again - Fields can be so unpredictable that you don't notice all the subtleties when you're still trying to figure out where it's all going. This one has plenty of good moments and also, despite its deceptively simple appearance, some careful craftsmanship.

This early short subject, beloved to some of us; really shows one of the great qualities that would set his (best) comedy apart: he was strange. Not exactly verbal comedy, nor really slapstick, W.C. seemed to create his own oddball universe much like, but never quite, ours.

I loved this short from the first time I saw it as a kid, and I think it's one of a kindness really makes it his best (though others are quite funny.) Mack Sennett wanted something more in the way of conventional slapstick; Feilds had to fight for this; which is in part a spoof of sentimental wilderness poetry about Alaska.

Nobody liked it at the time. Fields himself said, "maybe it's not good. But I like it." Thank Godness he stuck by his guns and went on to create his own one of a kind comedy world.

When I first saw this film I was wondering if it would be a spoof of Chaplin's "Gold Rush." However it's totally different. Fields is excellent and the film has a very good moral! ;-) I love the very sad song he sings which doesn't seem to have a rhyme in it.

One warning however, for DVD fans. The version I have was on a cheap DVD (along with "The Dentist" and "Golf Specialist"). Apparently, the company did a very bad job of porting the film over to digital because the soundtrack of every film is off by about 2 seconds. So the dialogue & sound effects are very mismatched. There is another company that puts out a DVD which is better quality but apparently while the overall quality is better, the version of "The Dentist" is censored & has cheezy music added in.

This is quite possibly the crown jewel in the long and illustrious career of an extremely troubled and very funny man. Fields has a field day sending up a style of melodrama popular at the time. At one and the same time, this is atypical of Fields' work generally, but still has his fingerprints all over it as well. Highlights are far too numerous to list, but Fields's rendition of the song, "The Fatal Glass of Beer" (you can't really accurately call it singing), the running gag, "It ain't a fit night out for man or beast" and the ending are hilariously perfect, with a sense of timing of which Chaplin would have been proud. Most joyously recommended

When this film was released in 1933, the majority of reviews were negative and even hostile. The film was hated and vilified; audiences and theatre owners found it tacky and cheap. They missed the whole point. The film is a sharp satire of both the Mellerdrammers of the early twentieth century and of studio filmmaking. Fields and Bruckman were too incisive as comics not to have done everything in this film very deliberately. From the overly obvious sets to the absolute WORST background projection ever seen, the film is a sly poke in Hollywood's eye and that's where its humor comes from. I just about wet myself the first time I saw Fields go out to "milk the elk". He stands in front of a background projection of elk in the snow and begins calling to them. When they start to run, they grow larger and larger, dwarfing the non-plussed Fields. Sadly, since this is a public domain title, it's hard to find a good copy of it. About the best I've seen is on the "6 Films by W.C. Fields" LD or DVD