Six of a Kind

A couple decide to drive to California for a second honeymoon and advertise for passengers to share the cost. The second couple who turn up are a disaster. On the road there is also money secretly slipped into a suitcase, and the husband is suspected of embezzlement. The film is not interested in plot. It is interested in bringing comedians onstage in turn: it is essentially a set of routines, and its best section is W.C. Fields' long sequence at a billiard table. Fields had played that routine for years in vaudeville, and here it is close to a recording of the stage act. The form is thirties Paramount comedy: short running time, fast dialogue and independent sketches strung along a road. Leo McCarey directed. He came out of work with the Marx Brothers and with Laurel and Hardy in the same period, and his approach was to let the performer go and let the scene grow on its own. Charles Ruggles, Mary Boland, W.C. Fields and the team of Burns and Allen star. Who it is for: viewers who like classical American comedy and W.C. Fields. Who it is not for: anyone after coherence. The film carries no real story and the links between the routines are thin.