The Fatal Glass of Beer

They say that W.C. Fields was unique among comedians, and I'm not going to argue. 'The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933),' generally ranked among his best efforts, wasn't as consistently hilarious as I'd been hoping, but one does certainly recognise that Fields had a style that was all his own. The film opens in the frozen Yukon goldfields, where a prospector sits huddled in the primitive shelter of a wooden hut – I immediately thought of Chaplin in 'The Gold Rush (1925),' but then the characters started speaking and the spell was broken. The loose plot concerns a simpleton prospector whose son travelled to the city and was consumed by the bottle, eventually winding up in prison for three years. It all unfolds in mock seriousness, with every character shamelessly hamming their lines to the camera in broad, ridiculous accents. From Fields' apparent contempt for his own storyline, I'd say he was satirising a type of film that was relatively common in the early sound era, the sort of sombre morality tale about the corruption of the Big City on impressionable rural minds.

Perhaps Fields' type of comedy takes some getting used to, and his absurdist style of wit might easily be misconstrued as sloppy or stilted. Are those rear projections supposed to look so ridiculously fake? I'd like to think so, but, then again, I've seen many movies where obviously-bogus backgrounds have been used with a completely straight face. A lot of the time, Fields' lack of subtlety works perfectly. There's absolutely no reason why getting hit in the face with snow after saying "and it ain't a fit night out for man nor beast" should be funny the sixth time around, but I laughed every time it happened. There's also a droll self-referential moment when Fields chokes on the artificial snow and declares, "tastes more like cornflakes." Even so, while good for the occasional chuckle, 'The Fatal Glass of Beer' feels oddly sparse in terms of laugh-out-loud jokes, and I certainly wasn't rolling in the aisles. Straight afterwards, I watched Buster Keaton's 'Cops (1922),' and that actually did have me laughing my head off – but that'd be opening a whole new can of worms, wouldn't it?

I take this to be a satire on the original "Fatal Glass of Beer" of thirteen years earlier (directed by Todd Browning!) and a poke in the eye of all maudlin movies about remorse and the return of the prodigal son.

It's the Canadian Northwest during a brutal blizzard. Fields, all wrapped up, sings a sad song to a visiting Mountie while playing the dulcimer with a massive mitten. bringing the listener to tears.

Returning home to his wife after "milking the moose", he finds his son returning home after being released from prison, sentenced after having had a single glass of beer that prompted him to steal some valuable bonds.

"Tell me, son, what did you do with the bonds?" And then guess what happens.

Funniest running gag. Five times -- count 'em -- five, Field stands in a doorway and proclaims that it's not a fit day out for man or beast, and has a bucket full of fake snow thrown in his face from offscreen.

Not Field's best. It's lost some luster over the years because maudlin movies are harder to find. Today, Fields satire would have to be directed at action movies.

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.

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 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