Man On The Flying Trapeze (1935) Director: Clyde Bruckman
“It must be hard to lose your mother-in-law.”
“Yes it is, very hard. It’s almost impossible.”
★★★★★
Clyde Bruckman’s final film before his tragic Hollywood suicide, Man on the Flying Trapeze is a terrifically hilarious W.C. Fields film. It is actually a loose remake of a film called Running Wild originally made in 1927, also starring W.C. Fields.
It tells the story of Ambrose Wolfinger (W.C. Fields) a “memory expert” for a woolen manufacturer – a memory expert was a file-keeper of sorts for major business clients. He is a henpecked husband –gentle and misunderstood. He lives with his wife, mother-in-law (who is stridently against alcohol), and lazy brother. Additionally, he has a daughter who defends his foibles at every turn. This film is filled with classic scenes –it opens with a sequence of two men robbing his house, and then discovering Wolfinger’s home-brewed “applejack” alcohol, they begin singing. He calls the police, and the officer arrives, but he starts singing and drinking with them, followed shortly by Wolfinger himself. Wolfinger talks about his desire to see the wrestling match the next day, but he is thrown in jail for having brewed “applejack” without a proper license. He is then bailed out by his wife after sharing a cell with an odd killer of sorts. The next day at work he tells a lie to his boss –that his mother-in-law died and he wishes to leave work early for her funeral– which his boss approves. He claims she died as a result of alcohol. However, instead Wolfinger simply plans to attend the wrestling match, though his brother-in-law has stolen his front-row seats. He leaves the match while his office sends a flurry of flowers to his house in memoriam of his supposedly dead mother-in-law. In a hilarious scene, he is pulled over by a policeman, and is then written up by another policeman, and then another, and then another. He hits several cars and loses a tire chasing it down the train tracks. Eventually he makes his way to the wrestling match but cannot go in, and one of the wrestler is sent flying into Wolfinger. He is found lying in a gutter, and his family thinks he got drunk and passed out in a gutter. His wife plans to leave him, though she misses him. At the end of the film, his daughter calls and negotiates a raise for her father and returns to work and buys a car. He makes amends with his family, driving them in his new car, but leaves his mother and brother-in-law in the outdoor backseat as they get rained on.
Reportedly, Fields actually directed most of this film owing to Bruckman’s alcoholism at the time. Fields is said to have been very much similar to the lovable drunken, clumsy, and muttering characters he portrayed on screen. He was the original Homer Simpson in many respects. He began his career in vaudeville where he met his wife and they had a son together, but they were later estranged, mainly because he refused to give up show business, but he voluntarily made payments to his wife each month and they remained in communication. He was a voracious reader of the classics and had an impressive library –he was also a staunch atheist. A lifelong lover of alcohol, Fields died in 1946 at the age of 66.
Man on the Flying Trapeze is quite possibly Fields’s best film, and is a great example of how much funnier and simple movies were in the 1930s. It remains a classic laugh-out-loud comedy.
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Credits:
- Directed by: Clyde Bruckman, W.C. Fields (uncredited), Sam Hardy (uncredited)
- Written by: W. C. Fields (story, as “Charles Bogle”), Sam Hardy (story), Ray Harris, Jack Cunningham (uncredited), John Sinclair (uncredited), Bobby Vernon (uncredited)
- Produced by: William LeBaron
- Starring:
- W.C. Fields…..Ambrose Wolfinger
- Mary Brian…..Hope Wolfinger, Ambrose’s daughter
- Kathleen Howard…..Leona Wolfinger, Ambrose’s wife
- Carlotta Monti…..Ambrose’s Secretary (Carlotta Monti was W.C. Fields’ mistress in reality, and in an early scene in the film, he calls her “Carlotta”)
- Cinematography: Alfred Gilks
- Edited by: Richard C. Currier
- Distributed by: Paramount Pictures