by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Man on the
Flying Trapeze (no article at the start
of the title, by the way), made by Paramount in 1935 and directed by Clyde
Bruckman from a script by Ray Harris and Sam Hardy based on an original story
by Hardy and “Charles Bogle” (i.e., W. C. Fields). According to a trivia item
on imdb.com, Fields himself directed much of this film because Bruckman was by
then a hopeless alcoholic who didn’t show up much of the time and was pretty
far out of it when he did try to work. The idea of W. C. Fields, with his legendary alcohol intake, having to cover for
someone even more fond of the bottle than he is bizarre — particularly since
the film begins with a drinking scene: two
burglars (Tammany Young and the young Walter Brennan, a year before his
breakthrough role in Sam Goldwyn’s production Come and Get It which won him the first Academy Award for Best
Supporting Actor) are sent, independently, by the same crime boss to break into
the cellar of the Wolfinger home and steal the silver. The residents are
Ambrose Wolfinger (W. C. Fields), who works as a memory expert for a woolen
mill and whose encyclopedic knowledge of every buyer the company deals with is
crucial to its success; his wife Leona (Kathleen Howard, who also played
Fields’ nagging wife the year before in It’s a Gift); Ambrose’s daughter (by a now-dead previous wife)
Hope (Mary Brian, who was on her way up to a major ingénue career in the late
silent era and never quite cracked the “A”-list but did make the transition to sound O.K. — she’s the
normal girl reporter Hildy Johnson [Pat O’Brien] wants to give up his career to
marry in the 1931 version of The Front Page); Leona’s mother Mrs. Neselrode (Vera Lewis); and
her no-account son Claude (played by Grady Sutton in a surprisingly
unsympathetic role for him — when Fields used him again in The Bank Dick he was the juvenile lead, but here he’s playing a
lazy bum who’s living off Ambrose’s money and laughing whenever he has a
misfortune).
Leona hears the burglars harmonizing on the song “On the Banks of
the Wabash” and first asks Ambrose if he left the radio on; when he mutters, in
Fields’ trademark mutter, that he didn’t, she leaps to the conclusion that
there are burglars singing in their cellar. The burglars, it seems, are helping
themselves to Wolfinger’s stash of homemade applejack and singing more loudly
and enthusiastically as they get more and more drunk. When Ambrose finally
calls the cops, the policeman who responds also samples some of the homemade applejack, gets drunk
and joins in the song — as does Ambrose himself when he crashes through the
cellar door. Eventually the cop takes both the burglars and Ambrose down to the
police station — and the night-court judge sentences Ambrose to $30 or thirty
days for having made an alcoholic beverage without a license. (Some of the
dates on his bottles show he was already making the stuff during Prohibition.)
Leona decides that leaving her errant husband in jail will teach him a lesson,
but daughter Hope bails him out using her own savings. Ambrose has bought a $15
front-row ticket to an upcoming world wrestling championship match between
reigning champion Tosoff (Tor Johnson, getting to show his face — at least what
we can see of it through the outrageously phony beard plastered on him to make
him look “Russian” — in a classic film with a legendary star two decades before
those bizarre films he made for Ed Wood) and Iranian challenger Hookalakah
Meshobbab (Harry Ekezian). Only while he’s in jail, still wearing his pajamas
and bathrobe, Claude lifts the ticket and goes to the match himself. Still
determined to go, Ambrose asks his boss, Mr. Malloy (Oscar Apfel), for the afternoon
off — only he lies and says he’s going to attend his mother-in-law’s funeral.
Malloy immediately decides that Mrs. Neselrode must have died from drinking
poisoned liquor — of course, the real Mrs. Neselrode is not only very much
alive but hasn’t drunk in her life! — and directs his assistant, Mr. Peabody
(Lucien Littlefield), to announce it to the staff and encourage them to send
flowers to the Wolfinger home. He also places a story about it in the local
paper. Meanwhile, Ambrose is put through the trials of the damned in his
attempt to attend the wrestling match, including three, count ’em, three cops who all write him tickets for the same
offense (one of the cops stops him and has him pull into a no-parking zone
which the other two ticket him for parking in), a supercilious chauffeur who
blocks his way as he’s trying to get out, a large trunk dumped in the middle of
the street blocking his way in the other direction, a flat tire and a runaway
spare which, in the film’s most bizarre scene, Ambrose has to chase down as it
bounds onto a railroad track and several times Ambrose has to dodge an oncoming
train (the wheel switches tracks just before he does!) while he’s chasing it
down so he can bring it back and put it on his car. By the time he gets to the match
— which his secretary (played by Carlotta Monti, Fields’ real-life girlfriend)
is also attending — it’s sold out and, standing at the entrance futilely trying
to get in, Ambrose is knocked down as Meshobbab throws Tosoff out of the ring
and Tosoff lands squarely on Ambrose’s body. His secretary is knocked down,
too, and Claude — just coming out of the match he attended on the ticket he
stole from Ambrose — sees the two of them in the gutter and reports back to his
mom and sister that Ambrose took his secretary to the match and both of them
were obviously drunk. When Mr. Peabody learns that Ambrose’s mother-in-law is
alive and he lied about her death to get the afternoon off, he fires him —
only, in the sort of worm-turning scene that had to end these productions, Hope gets on the phone
with a desperate Malloy, who needs Wolfinger not only for his memory but also
because Wolfinger’s papers are filed in a totally disorganized-looking system
and therefore he’s the only one who can find anything in the mess, agrees to
daughter Hope’s demand that Ambrose not only be rehired but given four weeks’
vacation and a raise. The final shot is of Ambrose offering his family a ride
in his new car — Hope and his wife Leona are allowed to sit with him but the
Neselrodes are forced to ride in the rumble seat during a torrential rainstorm.
Whatever the extent of Clyde Bruckman’s involvement in this film, Man on the
Flying Trapeze certainly shows his
“touch” — like the only other film in which he directed Fields, the screamingly
funny Mack Sennett short The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933), he and his writers lard on the
complications to almost surrealistic levels. Fields’ character emerges as an
almost Kafka-esque Everyman kept from doing what he wants to by forces not only
beyond his control but seemingly arrayed against him by a supernatural power. I
remember when I first saw this film in the early 1970’s on Channel 36, the San
José station we inexplicably got over the air with seemingly better signal
quality than some of the local channels, I decided it was Fields’ best movie
ever — and while I’m not sure I would rate it that highly this time around,
it’s certainly one of his best, distinguished
(like The Fatal Glass of Beer) by Bruckman’s mordant sensibility. Bruckman had a sad later life — in
the 1920’s he had worked as a writer for Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Laurel
and Hardy, among others, and had risen to director status (Bruckman and gag
writer Al Boasberg are credited as the directors of Keaton’s 1926 masterpiece, The
General, though with that movie
one suspects that Keaton himself was the real auteur; and certainly Bruckman’s experience with Keaton
and trains is readily apparent here in that gag of Fields chasing the tire down
the railroad tracks!) but after directing some of Lloyd’s first talkies (Welcome
Danger, Feet First, Movie Crazy) he ended up at Universal in the 1940’s writing gags for the
vest-pocket hour-long cheapie musicals that were a large stock of Universal’s
stock in trade. In 1950 he worked on Keaton’s local TV show on KTLA-Los Angeles
but couldn’t get any work anywhere else, especially once Lloyd sued him for
plagiarism for having recycled a gag he’d created for Lloyd in one of the
Universal musicals. In 1955 he asked Keaton to loan him a gun and used it to
kill himself. So one isn’t surprised to see his name as the credited director
on a movie about a man whose fates seem bound and determined to make him as
miserable as possible! Man on the Flying Trapeze certainly has a family resemblance to Fields’ other
movies playing a put-upon husband — the presence of Kathleen Howard as his wife
certainly points back to It’s a Gift, where she played essentially the same role — but it ramps up the tropes
to an almost surrealistic level of misery, and for that I tend to credit
Bruckman more than Fields himself or the other writers.
Man on the Flying
Trapeze is also quite well acted —
not only by Fields himself, who for all his hatred of Chaplin was quite good at
his own brand of pathos, but also by Mary Brian (in what could have turned into
just another stick-figure ingénue she turns in a performance of real power and
drive), Grady Sutton (seizing his rare chance to play an unsympathetic role
instead of a charming if ineffectual milquetoast) and even Walter Brennan in that
short role at the beginning as one of the burglars — and whoever plays the
third and nastiest of the cops Ambrose gets ticketed by is also quite good in
his dreadful, patronizing snottiness. But it’s the overall mise en scène that sets this one apart from Fields’ other
henpecked-husband films (with the arguable exception of The Bank Dick); Bruckman and the writers make Fields so put-upon we can’t help but root for him. Man on
the Flying Trapeze is a glorious movie, well
cast top to bottom (Rosemary Theby, who played Fields’ wife in his other film
with Bruckman, The Fatal Glass of Beer, appears here in the tiny role of “Helpful Passerby,” and the screen’s
very first movie star, Florence Lawrence (at least the first who was billed on
screen by name and publicized to “sell” her films), supposedly has a minor part
in here even though imdb.com lists her in the back end of their cast list and
doesn’t credit her role. This is a great film — maybe I will still call it W. C.’s best! — and an excellent
example of how much funnier comedies used to be than they are now. One humorous
(unintentionally) mistake was when the boss orders Mr. Peabody to look up
Ambrose Wolfinger in the phone book — and he opens the book to the middle. A
real name beginning with “W” would, of course, turn up towards the end. And I still don’t know why the film has the title it does —
unless the original plan was to have Wolfinger, the burglars and the cop sing
“The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” and it was only at the last minute
that they decided to have Fields and company sing “On the Banks of the Wabash”
instead. (This and the other Fields/Bruckman collaboration, The Fatal Glass
of Beer, are the only films I know
of in which W. C. Fields sings — if you can call it that.)
