Never Give a Sucker an Even Break

W. C. Fields plays himself: a man trying to sell a script to a studio and being fobbed off by everyone. The film first shows his everyday aggravations; boys insult him, a waitress is rude to him, he gets thumped in the street. Then Fields starts reading his script aloud and the film puts that script on the screen: leaping out of an aeroplane after a falling whisky bottle, a country on top of a mountain, a woman living there, and a run of scenes in which logic is switched off entirely. At seventy-one minutes the film gives up on the idea of a plot deliberately; the structure is built to mock itself. It was the last feature in which Fields took a starring role. Objections from the censorship office and studio interference meant scenes were removed during production, and the resulting disjointedness is now counted among the film's best-loved qualities. Margaret Dumont appears in a register close to her parts in the Marx Brothers films.