So's Your Old Man (1926)

It’s undeniable that a large part of W.C. Field’s comedy comes from his voice and half grumbled/half whispered method of snarky line delivery. A biographer wrote that as a child William Claude sat in front of his Philadelphia home with his mother, who used to call out greetings to neighbors and then, still smiling but under her breath toss in some less than kind observation on the person’s personality or circumstance. “Hello, Mr. Bentin,” then a whisper just for her son, “drunk again last night.”

Anyone familiar with Fields’ sound films, the bulk and most significant part of his oeuvre, can hear him through this film’s title cards. When he shows his family album to a visiting society dame, ah, woman, he tells her, “That’s cousin Sadie. She was the best dancer in burlesque,” then we hear the mumble, “until she lost her voice.”

The lack of vocalization here isn’t a deal-breaker because the picture is funny without it. Julian Johnson’s titles are frequently amusing, as when the girl’s beau is described as having reached “the ukulele stage of calf love.

But let’s go back to the beginning.

Fields is Sam Bisbee, eccentric inventor and member of the poorer population of Waukeagos. His family is standard issue Fields—his wife’s a harridan but his daughter loves and understands him. (This is supposed to stem from Fields’ own life: his wife hated but wouldn’t divorce him, and his son was absolutely on his mother’s side. Fields always believed that if he’d had a daughter instead, she would have supported him.) Daughter Alice (Catherine Reichert) is in love with the son (Charles “Buddy” Rogers) in the wealthy Murchison clan. Mrs. Murchison (Julia Ralph) calls on Mrs. Bisbee (Marcia Harris) to end the affair.

Sam is convinced that everything will turn out right because he has an appointment in New York to demonstrate his latest and greatest invention: shatterproof windshield glass. After the demonstration fails (through no fault of Sam’s) he considers suicide on the train ride home.

On the train he meets through accident Spanish Princess, Lescaboura (Alice Joyce), whom he mistakenly believes is also planning to kill herself. Thinking that she’s too young and pretty to do such a thing, he talks her out of it (he thinks) by telling her his story. She’s attracted to his honesty and kindness to strangers and decides to help him out at home by paying the town a surprise visit to see her old friend, Sam Bisbee.

Several writers are attached to the scenario, including Julian Leonard Street, Howard Emmett Rogers, J. Clarkson Miller, and Julian Johnson, but the eccentricity of the plot has Fields’ fingerprints all over it. Meeting a Spanish Princess on a train? Really? And some of Sam’s lines sound so much like Fields. “This glass of mine is harder to break then a blonde’s heart.”

Fieldsian themes include the superficiality of class, and the only way to survive in life is through deception or the con. After all, the worm may turn but when it does it’s still a worm at both ends. Nothing succeeds like dumb luck.

And, of course, Fields had to work in one of his vaudeville routines, this time the golf sketch, which is funny no matter how often you see it, or hear it, or don’t.

The picture was directed by Gregory La Cava and shot by George Webber. Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky produced for Paramount. It was remade by Paramount with Fields in 1934 as You’re Telling Me.