The Fatal Glass of Beer

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.

When this film was released in 1933, the majority of reviews were negative and even hostile. The film was hated and vilified; audiences and theatre owners found it tacky and cheap. They missed the whole point. The film is a sharp satire of both the Mellerdrammers of the early twentieth century and of studio filmmaking. Fields and Bruckman were too incisive as comics not to have done everything in this film very deliberately. From the overly obvious sets to the absolute WORST background projection ever seen, the film is a sly poke in Hollywood's eye and that's where its humor comes from. I just about wet myself the first time I saw Fields go out to "milk the elk". He stands in front of a background projection of elk in the snow and begins calling to them. When they start to run, they grow larger and larger, dwarfing the non-plussed Fields. Sadly, since this is a public domain title, it's hard to find a good copy of it. About the best I've seen is on the "6 Films by W.C. Fields" LD or DVD

That Fatal Glass Of Beer refers to a glass that George Chandler took on a trip to the big city which led to a life of crime. This particular short subject for Mack Sennett that W.C. Fields did was one of his masterpieces.

It's not a series of gags although there are some good ones here including that recurring one where he goes to the cabin door and says it's not a fit night out for man nor beast and then gets hit with a blast of studio snow. But the film itself is a really good satire on all the Victorian morality plays that Fields grew up with in his youth.

Rosemary Theby as his wife and George Chandler as their son get a few laughs as well. Chandler left the Yukon wilds and went to the big city where demon rum got a hold of him and he robbed a bank of some bonds which he was carrying as a messenger.

Such stories were the staple of the theater while Fields grew up in the 1880s and 1890s. That Fatal Glass Of Beer is a great spoof on all of them. As one of the great tipplers of Hollywood, Fields had little patience with pompous moralizers. And remember Prohibition was coming to a close when That Fatal Glass Of Beer was made. People were very tired of the great experiment as it was called and this film no doubt found an eager audience.

Definitely the best of the short subjects of W.C. Fields.

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 the ultimate satire on those "lost in the wilderness" and "alcohol is the devil" films, done in the early days of the talkies. W. C. plays the patriarch of the family, who seem to live in the midst of an endless snowstorm in the Yukon; every single time he opens a door and proclaims "It's not a fit night out for man nor beast", he gets a faceful of snow. His son, Chester, played by the wonderful George Chandler, was put in jail for 3 years for stealing bank bonds after drinking a single, fatal glass of beer. He comes home and is welcomed by his crying mother and his father, who wasn't crying when he first greeted his son, but soon does when the son starts to cry and the mother won't quit. W.C. goes out to "milk an elk", and of course gets a faceful of snow. In fact, he is covered in fake snow throughout this short, even inside.

There are hilarious cuts of W.C. against a background screen, which show either the snowy wastes careening by and W.C. and the dog sled team merely walking, or a herd of elk stampeding while W.C. talks pleadingly to them to "come to papa". He goes out to get water, but gets nothing but ice cubes from the pump. I laughed more at this than anything else I've seen lately; it's a real gem.