When McGonigle first sees Cleopatra, he says "Who's the old squigelum over there?" "Squigelum" is a Fields nonsense word. He would use it again in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941) to describe the kissing game he teaches Ouliotta Hemogloben.
The sheriff serving McGonigle the writ comes from New Philadelphia. Philadelphia was Fields' home town, a city he reportedly detested.
The centerpiece of McGonigle's repertory show is a cheap melodrama in which McGonigle himself plays a lecherous predator intent on seducing a woman whose husband has gone missing. At one point, with sounds of a storm outside and the destitute woman and her daughter huddled in their broken-down cabin, he enters menacingly. Surely movie audiences of 1934 immediately recognized all the elements of Fields's entrances during the storms in his legendary short of the previous year, The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933). Sure enough, a stagehand just outside the door tosses a handful of 'snow' on Fields then, as he turns toward the door, another handful, as Fields delivers his immortal line, "Ain't a fit night out for man nor beast."
One of over 700 Paramount productions, filmed between 1929 and 1949, which were sold to MCA/Universal in 1958 for television distribution, and have been owned and controlled by Universal ever since. By this time sponsor interest in the already long dead Fields was at its lowest ebb, and telecasts were few and far between. Its earliest documented airings took place in Seattle Thursday 26 February 1959 on KIRO (Channel 7) and in Minneapolis Saturday 22 August 1959 on WTCN (Channel 11). It was released on DVD 20 March 2007 as one of 5 titles in the W.C. Fields Comedy Collection Volume 2, and again 4 June 2013 as one of 10 titles in Universal's W.C. Fields Comedy Favorites Collection and has also enjoyed an occasional airing on cable TV on Turner Classic Movies.