NFR Project: 'It's a Gift' (1934)

 

NFR Project: ‘It’s a Gift’

Dir: Norman Z. McLeod

Scr: Jack Cunningham

Pho: Henry Sharp

Ed: N/A

Premiere: Nov. 17, 1934

68 min.

This, my favorite W.C. Fields film, is not based on his best-remembered persona – that of the cynical, drink-addled conman. It is a secondary but much more moving persona he resorts to in this feature – the put-upon, patiently suffering average American man.

Fields is the hapless Harold Bissonette (pronounced ‘Biss-oh-NAY’), a simple storekeeper who’s burdened with a contemptuous wife, oblivious children, and terrifying customers. He dreams of owning an orange ranch in California. When fate intervenes, sending him a windfall due to the death of Uncle Bean, he buys a site sight unseen, packs up the family, and heads West.

The film is really a collection of shorter sketches gathered together under a loose narrative, sketches which were time-tested for their effectiveness. Harold’s ineffectuality is evident from the beginning, when his daughter commandeers the bathroom mirror, forcing him into all manner of contortions to get shaved. His wife is at him constantly, and his young son is interested only in his roller skates. “Don’t you love me, Pop?” the kid queries. Fields makes as to hit him. “Don’t you strike that child!” his wife exclaims. “He's not gonna tell ME I don’t love him!” Fields replies.

Harold makes his way downstairs, where a brace of unruly customers confront him. An obnoxious man wants 10 pounds of kumquats. Fields struggles to fill his order, as -- “Look out! Here comes Mr. Muckle, the blind man!”  -- weaves his way to the store, shattering the glass doors, destroying a display of light bulbs, cantankerously complaining as Fields gets him a pack of chewing gum (Fields must yell into his ear trumpet; Muckle is a tad deaf as well). Even Fields’ familiar nemesis Baby LeRoy steps in and ruins his store.

The centerpiece of the film is the long sequence in which Fields tries to get to sleep on his back porch in the middle of the night. First his perch collapses; then the milkman comes along with his noisy bottles. A stray cocoanut clatters down the stairs. The gleefully malevolent Baby LaRoy drops objects on him. Two idiot women loudly debate what to get at the pharmacy. An insurance salesman briskly strides up – “Do you know a man name of Carl LaFong – Carl LaFong? Capital L, small A, capital F, small O, small N, small G?!” He proceeds to try to sell Fields a policy. “You can, by paying only five dollars a week, retire at 90 on a comfortable income!”

In short, the world is set up against the best efforts of Harold to live a peaceful life. (He gets a quick snort in now and then.) He never explodes; he simply and calmly mutters asides out of the corner of the mouth.

When Harold takes his family to California, it turns out that the orange ranch was a pig in a poke. The ranch house is a gutted shack; the oranges are the size of walnuts. His family turns and begins to walk away from him. He sits on his car: it collapses. It appears that Harold is doomed.

Then Fields, with wicked wit, turns the tables. It runs out that his property is valuable – it is needed to build grandstands for a new racetrack. Fields can name his price, and does. We cut to the view of a beautiful orange ranch. The wife and children are off to church in a chauffeured car. Fields contentedly plucks a large orange from a branch and squeezes it to make himself a healthy cocktail.

Fields’ depiction of his domestic imprisonment carries the sting of experience, making him an unlikely sympathetic character. We root for Mr. Bissonette because he is one of us, thwarted incessantly by the lunacy of those around him. The grand wish fulfillment of the denouement gives us a fairy-tale ending that only underlines everything that has gone before.

We leave Fields in peace, away from the insulting bustle and stupidity of the human race. It’s a place that can only be gotten to in the movies.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Little Miss Marker.

Character study: 'A Real Pain'

 

A Real Pain

Dir: Jesse Eisenberg

Scr: Jesse Eisenberg

Pho: Michal Dymek

Ed: Robert Nassau

Premiere: Nov. 1, 2024

90 min.

Jesse Eisenberg is a familiar face on screen. His nervous, stuttering persona has graced many movies, including The Social Network and Zombieland. However, he’s an aspiring screenwriter and director as well. A Real Pain is his most effective effort to date.

It’s the story of two cousins, the uptight Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, whose character is a hodgepodge of strong feelings, earnestly expressed. They were raised together almost as brothers, so their reunion after what seems to have been a few years is a study in what changes and what does not change in people as they grow older.

The cousins are on a vacation together, if you can call it that. They are touring the concentration camps in Poland. This somber journey is punctuated by the incessant irritation of Eisenberg, who can’t handle the exuberant informality of Culkin’s character. It’s a movie full of quirky humor, that works despite the very serious backdrop to it all.

In the end, Eisenberg gives us no great revelations, no climactic incident. People are who they are, he seems to be saying, in many ways immutable. The grace that comes with accepting that is an aspect of growing up not often paid attention to. Eisenberg gives us an artfully crafted description of that.

For adults only: 'Anora'

 

For adults only: ‘Anora’

 

Anora

Dir: Sean Baker

Scr: Sean Baker

Pho: Drew Daniels

Ed: Sean Baker

Premiere: Oct. 18, 2024

139 min.

Sean Baker’s feature Anora is strictly for adults. Why? First, because it contains a lot of frankly sexual content. Secondly, and more important, it deals with grown-up reality, which will be much more a deal-breaker for potential viewers than the sex part.

Baker, best known for his The Florida Project (2017), makes movies about people dwelling at the edges of the American dream. Here he picks up the tale of a young stripper of the title, played most excellently by Mikey Madison. She works in New York, and because she can speak Russian, she is tapped to entertain Vanya, the wasted young son of a Russian oligarch.

The two get along, and soon Vanka is paying “Ani” for a week of pretending to be his girlfriend. Then he proposes marriage in Vegas. They get hitched . . . and soon the parents find out. It turns out that Vanya would like a green card, so that he doesn’t have to go home and work for his father. Vanya’s mother races to New York, insisting that the marriage be annulled.

Ani gets swept up in all this due to an ironic naivete that doesn’t travel well with the explicit sex work she specializes in. She is an expert at being desirable; marriage to a rich man could easily be seen as the ultimate goal of a woman in her profession. She gets what she dreamed of, but it quickly and shoddily falls apart. It’s only when the dreams are broken that we see begin to perceive Ani’s great and unexpected strengths.

This is a Cinderella story, albeit one that ends seemingly unhappily. It’s also a refutation of Pretty Woman, which I am always up for.

Whoever’s in power decided to not promote this film! Have you ever heard of it before today? I only saw it by sheer chance. The sexual content is almost all at the front of the movie, and it is so in your face that for a while I considered the idea that this was the wrong kind of film to watch. I can imagine it was a nightmare for marketers to try and think how to sell this film. But that’s because Baker tells real stories about believable people, interesting characters that go through life-changing experiences, for better and for worse.

So, if you are a mature and thoughtful adult, I highly recommend this comedy of manners for the 21^st century, which turns out far more poignantly than you might expect.