It's a Gift

Harold Bissonette runs a grocery and never gets a moment's peace. A blind customer breaks everything in the shop, a child is always underfoot, and his wife scolds him with every sentence. It is the same at home; he tries to sleep on the porch and a salesman arrives at six in the morning. Then news: a relative has died and left him money. Harold decides to buy an orange grove in California. His family objects. They get in the car and cross the country. What they find is dry ground and a ruined shack. Norman Z. McLeod directs. W.C. Fields plays Harold; Baby LeRoy, Kathleen Howard and Jean Rouverol are in the cast. It is an American production, made in 1934. The screenplay rests on stage sketches Fields wrote himself and some passages had been performed on stage before. The section on the porch is its best known part and is built almost as a single scene. The matter it treats is never being left alone; the comedy comes not from large events but from interruptions. The narrative uses Fields's known persona; the man is bad tempered, impatient and gets on with nobody. The film is episodic; the scenes stand on their own and the plot is weak. The narrative shows the family without mercy too and builds no sweet reconciliation. The ending turns on luck, and that is a deliberate joke. Its limit is age; the jokes belong to their period, the pace is slow, and the recording old. Who it is for: viewers who like classic American comedy and W.C. Fields. Who it is not for: it is old, episodic, and the humour of its time.