The absent-minded widower Dentist (W.C. Fields) is at home reading his newspaper at the breakfast table while his grown daughter, Mary (Marjorie 'Babe' Kane), wrestles around with a big chunk of ice, as she tries to put it in the ice box. They indulge in a lot of smart gab showing he is tough, nasty-tempered but a softy at heart. After learning of his daughter's affections for their Ice Man, Arthur (Harry Bowen), and making his disapproval known, he gets a telephone call from Charlie Frobisher (Bud Jamison) to come out for a an early morning game of golf.
During his nastiness on the Golf Course, he beans a player still on the green ahead of him. Trying to win his game (playing strikingly reminiscent of Field's Ziegfeld "Follies" act) the ornery and ill-tempered Dentist's trials and tribulations end up in frustration. He's a terrible golfer and quite the cheat. Finally, he's had enough, yelling at his caddy (Bobby Dunn), throwing his club in the pond, then his golf bag, then the caddy.
After a disastrous round of golf, the Dentist returns to his dentistry office In ill-humor, which is situated on the lower level front of his residence. With the assistance of his nurse (Zedna Farley), the pompous, gasbag of a Professional Man takes his ire out on his scheduled appointments with his dental patients: a screaming woman with a toothache, a man in the waiting room who quietly walks out after hearing someone scream, and another patient (Elise Cavanna) in a wrestling match tooth-extraction gag with the Dentist dragging her about with her bad tooth still attached to his pliers. Trying to pull a tooth from this society matron, his patient wraps her legs around him, and hangs on for dear life. He and the patient assume every possible position as he attempts to pull her tooth out.
Mary is locked in her upstairs bedroom by her boisterous, bone-headed bully of a father so she doesn't run away and marry the ice man. She stubbornly stamps her feet repeatedly on the floor, causing the plaster from the ceiling to fall into a patient's open mouth.
And a final adventure is with a heavily whiskered Russian man, a beard so bushy the Dentist needs to use a stethoscope to find his mouth. Then he brings a shotgun (a Remington model 11) into use when he flushes a covey of birds from the man's bushels of beard hair.
After Arthur knocks down the man who just punched the Dentist, he changes his attitude toward the Ice Man, as a prospective son-in-law. Mary climbs down from the window of her locked room, in the process of eloping with her boyfriend, Arthur. Mary pleads: "Father, you're not really going to buy that (electric) Frigidaire, are You?" After a moment's reflection, he responds "Fifty pounds(of ice), and make it snappy".
A black and white 1932 pre-Code American comedy short Film, directed by Leslie Pearce, shot by John W. Boyle, starring legendary comic W.C. Fields, at the top of his game, co-starring Marjorie Kane, Arnold Gray, Zedna Farley, Elise Cavanna, Bud Jamison, Pete Rasch, Henry Hanna, Emma Tansey and Billy Bletcher. Ethel La Blanche was originally cast as Miss Pepitone, but was replaced by Dorothy Granger. Similarly, William Searby was originally cast as the Caddy, but was replaced by Bobby Dunn.
This was the first of four 20 minute grand vaudeville comedy shorts produced by Mack Sennett at Paramount. Based on the Broadway stage skit "An Episode at the Dentist" written by W.C. Fields for the "Earl Carroll Vanities" in 1928. It has a good blend of sight gags and dialogue jokes.
A crude comedy in every sense of the word, with fine dialogue delivered in the typical Fields fashion, a rapier like tongue dishing out what could only be referred to as being politically in-correct humor. This raunchy and very naughty comedy pulls no punches. The 'suggestive' scene where Fields is pulling the woman's tooth is loosely based on a well-known (at the time) stag smoker film that was made in the 1920s called "The Slow Fire Dentist" which featured that dentist pulling a woman's tooth standing between her legs , her getting tangled in his coat, and being under heavy sedation. Lenny Bruce is often attributed as creator of the 'sick joke', but Fields was into this bent humor decades before. Making cynicism, cruelness somehow funny, is part of American culture.
Fields' spoken dialogue, which he had written, with all the sexual innuendo, and surprisingly risqué sight gags, caused a furor with the censors at the time of its release, especially the use of that motory sounding drill, which gets the biggest laughs from its viewers.
The other 3 W.C.Fields Comedy Shorts done for Producer Mack Sennett were "The fatal Glass of Beer" (1933), "The Pharmacist" (1933) and "The Barber Shop" (1933).
This string of Fields' gags, all strung together in this short pleasing precious little package, is funny and edgy, and worth a look for anyone who likes these 30's-style short comedies, and provides an interesting peek into American life in 1932.
20 авг 2024
