You're Telling Me!

You're Tellling Me finds W.C. Fields pitted against the world again, the immediate world and the outside world. And Fields fights it with the weapons of his choice, rye or gin. You're Telling Me actually does get a bit serious for a while.

He's Sam Bisbee in this film, ne'er do well optometrist and full time henpecked husband of Louise Carter and father of Joan Marsh. Joan would like to marry Buster Crabbe who's the son of the town's leading snob Kathleen Howard, but it looks hopeless.

Fields's one love besides his family and booze is inventing things. He actually may have something in a puncture proof tire. But in a demonstration where he shoots the tires of a police car it gets him in some trouble.

Here's actually where this Fields comedy takes a serious turn. He's actually contemplating suicide on the way back home on the commuter train, but then seeing a young lady Adrienne Ames in distress and contemplating the same thing, he talks her and ironically himself out of it. She turns out to be his guardian angel in many ways and turns the tide for new friend socially and economically.

This was first the first film Fields did with Kathleen Howard. Someone at Paramount must have seen something because the following year they were teamed as husband and wife in It's A Gift. She became Fields's Margaret Dumont in that one.

You're Telling Me is the film where Bill Fields got do his golf routine which is almost as famous as his pool shark specialty. It comes at the end of the film where a contrite town who just thought of him as the town drunk, now asks him to open their new country club. It's still holds very well today and a source of amusement for duffers everywhere.

In fact the whole film is as amusing as it was when it premiered in 1934. The comedy of W.C. Fields is timeless.