Esperto Contra Sabido

Tillie And Gus has Alison Skipworth and W.C. Fields respectively in the title roles in this shortest of the feature films of W.C. Fields. It runs slightly less than an hour, but a lot of laughs get packed in. I also think if the term can be applied to Fields, he's at his most heroic in this film that is too rarely seen.

Fields and Skipworth worked well together in their part of the Paramount classic If I Had A Million so Adolph Zukor decided to give them a shot at a feature. I only wish they had done more joint projects.

Skipworth is unusual because she's an equal partner with Fields in chicanery. Usually Fields is married to a bossy tyrant like Kathleen Howard, but Skipworth is more an equal. She loves him despite his ways, but doesn't take anything off him either.

Aunt Tillie and Uncle Gus are called in by their niece Julie Bishop and her husband Phillip Trent who've been the victim of a bottom feeding shyster played deliciously by Clarence Wilson. All they have left is a ferry boat that has seen better days and Wilson is determined to get his hands on that too.

It all gets settled in a boat race and Fields sabotages the opposing boat as nicely as the Marx Brothers sabotaged La Traviata in A Night At The Opera. Seeing Fields in one of those old diving suits is funny enough, what he does to the boat is hilarious.

Bishop thinks her uncle and aunt are missionaries, they're actually a pair con artists. But they never had a greater mission than helping a family member. Blood is thicker, just ask the Corleones.

In any event this film proves you don't mess with Tillie And Gus.

Let's get this over with right now: I'm a lifetime W. C. Fields fan. Having read every recognized biography about him, I believe Fields's comedic genius as a performer and writer should be lionized in 24K gold and featured at the Smithsonian. We shall not see another bombastic comedian like Fields for many decades to come, which is precisely why his films continue to entertain and delight old and new generations of movie fans.

The Tillie and Gus plot is thin and straightforward but holds up substantially (in 2021) even though it was first released more than 88 years ago in 1933. Tillie and Augustus find mean old Phineas Pratt attempting to cheat a young couple out of her father's inheritance, including the rights of a ferry franchise and a ferry boat. The only way to keep the franchise is to win a race against Pratt's boat. And we're off!

No spoilers here. Watch this film as soon as possible. This is the way comedy was meant to be seen, heard, and enjoyed.

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.

"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 (Paramount, 1933), directed by Francis Martin, stars W.C. Fields and Alison Skipworth, in their second collaboration together following their hilarious "roadhog" segment from the episodic motion picture, IF I HAD A MILLION (1932). With Fields and Skipworth as Paramount's answer to MGM's own Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler, of MIN AND BILL (1930) and TUGBOAT ANNIE (1933) fame, the plot for TILLIE AND GUS could very well be Paramount's equivalent to TUGBOAT ANNIE (1933), however, the only difference is that there's no need in borrowing from MGM or calling this one TUGBOAT TILLIE, for example, considering how Paramount has Fields and Skipworth at the helm is all that's needed in keeping this 58 minute comedy afloat.

The story begins not with Tillie and Gus but with the introduction of a young married couple, Tom (Clifford Jones) and Mary Sheridan (Jacqueline Wells), along with their baby boy called "King" (Baby LeRoy) and their very smart pet duck, taking up residence in the town of Danbury. After the reading of the will by Mary's father, John Blake, who died bankrupt, Phineas Platt (Clarence Wilson), a family lawyer and a crooked one at that, loots the estate for himself, leaving the girl nothing but an old ferry boat, forcing Tom, a college student, from obtaining his engineering degree. Mary, who has notified her Aunt Tillie and Uncle Gus, working their separate ways as missionaries, of the situation, hopes they'll come over to guide them. Enter Augustus Q. Winterbottom (W.C. Fields), revealed not as a missionary as depicted, but a professional card sharp forced to leave Alaska by a judge (Edgar Kennedy) following a crooked game; and Tillie Winterbottom (Alison Skipworth), his ex-wife, owner of a Soo Chow Club in Shanghai, China, who, after received Mary's telegram, gambles away her place to the Swede (Ivan Linow), earning enough money to book passage to Danville. Once they meet at a train station in Seattle, where Gus addresses Tillie as "My Little Chickadee" (Fields' most famous catch phrase), the couple soon forget their differences, offering their assistance to the young couple by arranging a ferry boat race between the defunct Fairy Queen and Pratt's very own Keystone to the Old Town dock that's to take place on the 4th of July, with amusing results.

For Fields' first starring feature role since the silent era of 1928, TILLIE AND GUS offers great promise with fine comedy material (Fields and Skipworth as dedicated missionaries shown in their true surroundings; W.C. cheating suckers at cards and his mixing of paint while listening to the instructor on radio), offbeat one-liners (Tillie: "Do you like children?" Gus: "I do if they're properly cooked"), and a touch of suspense (Baby LeRoy in a mini-bathtub that falls off the deck and floating down the river), there's not enough to rank this the comedy classic as Fields' latter IT'S A GIFT (1934) and THE BANK DICK (1940). In some ways, it's a quiet comedy in the Will Rogers tradition, highlighted by both the steamboat race and the support of familiar faces as Edgar Kennedy, George Barbier, Barton MacLane, and of course Clarence Wilson, whose face is enough to frighten any child away from his property whenever ordering them to "scoot." Baby LeRoy, the year-old infant whose dialog consists of overdubbed baby noises, cries and laughter, makes one of Fields' better known advisories under the age of five.

Never distributed on video cassette, TILLIE AND GUS was one of the features presented on Turner Classic Movies in June 2001 with W.C. Fields as its "Star of the Month," before being placed to DVD a few years later. Although Fields and Skippy would be paired once more in SIX OF A KIND (1934), who else can play phony missionaries and he singing "Bringing in the Sheeves" as their lovable characters of Tillie and Gus? (**1/2)