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TechnoTV - It's a Gift
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List Price: $14.98
Our Price: $22.99
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Manufacturer: Universal Studios
Starring: W.C. Fields, Kathleen Howard, Jean Rouverol, Julian Madison, Tommy Bupp
Directed By: Norman Z. McLeod
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9780783228341
Format: Black & White
ISBN: 0783228341
Label: Universal Studios
Manufacturer: Universal Studios
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Universal Studios
Release Date: 1998-10-13
Running Time: 73
Studio: Universal Studios
Theatrical Release Date: 1934-11-17
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: "Beautiful California Orange Ranch...ah....I've got my heart set on this thing and I'm going through with it!"
Comment: This is my favorite comedy movie and that's saying something. I love comedy and comedians. This movie is in a category of its own. I first saw this movie with my cousin Walter Gabrielson in 1969 when it played on one of the late show channels, probably KHJ, in Los Angeles on a Saturday night. I laughed so hard I missed half the movie.
Fields plays Harold Bissonette, henpecked husband, struggling corner grocery store owner, and disrespected father who awaits fate to lift him out of the painful banality of his life. Fate arrives with an inheritance from the passing of his Uncle Bean. It is his ticket to California where the state motto is "Eureaka! I've Found it." He takes a chance on it.
California was the glamorous destination of the 1930's. My mother told me of listening late at night on my Grandfather's farm to the radio shows coming from Hollywood night clubs and imagining dancing with glamorous leading men. Bobby Short's "Get your Kicks on Route 66" was the anthem. John Steinbeck gave it literary respectability when he wrote "The Grapes of Wrath" about the Okies piling their jalopies with worldly goods and going to California. Harold Bissonette's eight seater looks much like those jalopies.
Into this story line are plugged the W.C.Fields comic masterpieces that he had been honing for many years. Here they reach perfection. The Breakfast scene, the Mr. Muckle scene, the "cumquats" exchange, the "phone call to/from the maternity ward" scene, the sleeping porch scene, which reaches it climax with the "Carl LaFong" exchange. Then, there is the whole sequence of the Orange Ranch disappointment turned into success by accident. Rare is the film that is both a period piece and yet an eternal verity.
Fields is obviously the star with top billing, but it is a mistake to think that he could do this alone. Fields had an ensemble troop that he played his comedy off and they were essential to his work. In this movie, he had Baby LeRoy, Tammany Young, Charles Sellon (Mr. Muckle), T. Roy Barnes (Insurance agent inquiring about Carl La Fong), and Morgan Wallace playing Fitzmuller who wants the cumquats.
Last but certainly not least is Kathleen Howard who is brilliant as Amelia Bissonette. When she says, "I have no maid....probably never shall." Her disappointment in Harold is biting. When, upon seeing the ranch house in California, she proclaims "Ranch house!!! It's a SHACK!" Her voice penetrates directly into the skull and delivers a jolt to the top of the spine. She was underrated to say the least.
Norman McLeod was a primer comedy director who worked with the Who's Who of comedy actors.
My Advice: Get the DVD W.C. Fields Comedy Collection Vol. 1. This film along with the Bank Dick represent the best of W.C. Fields and the transfers are great.
Customer Rating:
Summary: If you are young at heart, the dreams can come true!
Comment: The memorable lesson of will and encouraging self determination of a man who is living the winter of his existence, alienated and disappointed with the members of his family, have become this film a real cult movie since its immediate release.
After the recent turmoil of the Great Depression and the countless financial failures and spiritual wounds left behind, this film emerged like a brave message about you or me can be able to do , albeit the most adverse circumstances.
The rest of the anecdote runs for you. Watch and delight this surprising and smart film, a legitimate lesson of life, even for the actual and next generations to come.
A wise advise:Release it in DVd and Blue Ray format, it would be pleased for many, many people.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Funniest Movie Ever Made "It's a G ift" W.C. Fields, et al.
Comment: The Funniest Movie Ever Made "It's a G ift" W.C. Fields, et al.
This is without the slightest doubt the funniest movie ever made. Every time I've watched it, which is about 8-10 times, I end up on the floor, barely able to breathe, and I don't drink, nor do I have any pulmonary problems. The scene with the coconut bouncing down the stairs in a perfectly timed rhythm is one of the funniest (I don't know how they did it), and one of my other favorite scenes involves the insurance peddler looking for Karl Lafong, not to mention the scene in which the man wants to buy cumquats, and Fields asks "How many quats?" There are too many funny bits in this film to mention, which means you may very well laugh yourself to death. There are lesser fates.
Fields, who wrote the script under the pseudonym of Charles Bogle (he has a genius for comic names almost equaling Dickens), plays greengrocer Harold Bissonette (pronounced Bissonay!), long-suffering henpecked husband and father. His wife nags him, his daughter treats him like a bathroom fixture to be moved out of the way, and his son, who nearly kills his father by leaving a stray roller skate lying around has the cheek to ask "What's the matter, Pop? Don't you love me anymore?" I leave it to you to imagine the reaction of the man who once said that one should never share a stage with children or animals. In this movie, there are two children, but no animals. What this poor man heroically deals with is quite enough for anyone's endurance, so when he decides to sell his business and move to a California "orange ranch" or grove, we've long since been on his side, cheering him along. Even the cumquat man says "More power to you" as the long-suffering Harold tries to crank start his Model A.
A masterpiece of comic timing, both in script and in acting and directing, "It's a Gift" is a gift to us all. Show it to your children, and it'll make better people of them. Perhaps not, but you can try, and by trying, you'll be enjoying the funniest movie of all time. In these trying times, the gift of laughter is the best of all, and that's the best reason to get this DVD as soon as possible. (It's part of a collection of other Fields masterpieces).
Customer Rating:
Summary: La Fong! Capital "L" small "a" Capital "F" small "o" small "n" small "g"...........
Comment: "Sit down Mr. Muckle, sit down honey." "WHERE ARE MY KUMQUATS???!!!"
This perfect comedy is, for my money, the funniest film W.C. Fields ever made, and that's not faint praise. Small town grocer Harold Bissonette takes his family to California when his Uncle "Bean" dies and he inherits an orange grove. This road trip comes sometime past the halfway point of the picture. And what has taken up the first half? Just some of the funniest set pieces Fields ever devised.
First there is his harrassed home life, put-upon by everyone from his shrewish wife to his son Norman's errant and deadly rollerskates. Then there is his harried working life with the furiously impatient customer yelling for his kumquats while Fields attempts to keep the blind Mr. Muckle from destroying every light bulb in his stock with no help from his numbskull assistant whom he doesn't hesitate to abuse. (I read that Fields put in the Mr. Muckle bit to answer a dare that he couldn't find humor in a disabled character...well he did and it is a classic). Then there is the long piece of Fields trying to sleep on the porch beset by rolling coconuts and wood staircases, loud whiny neighbors, shouting vegetable vendors, and the obnoxious annuity salesman looking for the elusive Mr. Lafong "the railroad'n man". The mounting frustration,including Baby Leroy trying to skewer him with an icepick, is a classic exercise in the slow building of comedic bits, one on another, to capture the perfect portrait of utter irritation. And finally there is the road trip where Fields shows his put-upon everyman to be just as boorish as anyone as he and his family trash an estate and carry on like rubes.
It all ends, as Fields movies often did, with Bissonette triumphant, and finally embraced by his obsteperous family and allowed to indulge his fancy for alcohol and oranges. A great movie that wastes no time and moves from one classic bit to the other without distraction. I don't know if modern audiences can appreciate how radical Fields was in his day presenting a central character with few redeeming graces and every vice conceivable and endearing this character to a far different, far less cynical and snarky, America than the one we live in. He was a genius, and this film captures it. DVD soon please.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Best There Is
Comment: W.C. Fields was simply the most talented comedian who ever lived, and "It's a Gift" (1934) is his most accessible feature. It's a loose remake of the 1926 silent "It's the Old Army Game" which stared Fields and Louise Brooks; and which Fields wrote. Like most silent features, the scene transitions are very abrupt, with titles used in place of scripted transitional elements.
For "It's a Gift", Director Norman McLeod elected to stay true to the original and keep the flavor of its sudden transitions. Although the technique is jarring to modern viewers it works to the film's comic advantage by speeding up the pace of the film, as it moves from set piece to set piece with virtually no filler. You get everything that would have had any entertainment value in a 90-minute feature compressed into a 73-minute picture. Imagine a four-act play with one-second breaks between each act.
Act I takes place in the in the apartment home of the Bissonette family; consisting of put upon everyman husband/father Harold (Fields), his shrewish wife Amelia (Kathleen Howard), overwrought teenage daughter Jean (Jean Rouverol), and roller skating 9-year old son Norman (Tom Bupp). The most famous bit is Fields trying to finish shaving after his daughter has eased him away from the bathroom mirror.
Harold is the proprietor of a small grocery store and Act II takes place inside the store. The most famous bit concerns blind Mr. Muckle (Charles Sellon) whose flailing cane causes a staggering amount of damage.
Act III finds Harold back home trying to set some sleep. The best bit involves a series of trivial interruptions as everyone from the milk man to an insurance salesman manage to disturb him the moment it appears he is finally going to get some rest.
Act IV is the family's move to California by automobile to start a new life on an orange ranch Harold has purchased with his inheritance.
It's pretty much constant laughs, all the more remarkable because Fields stays in character for the entire duration. Harold Bissonette is his most sympathetic character, just an average guy badgered and hounded to the point of exasperation. Unlike his other features there are no cheap laughs from drinking or from leering at young women. The comedy derives entirely from Fields (and Howard who gets a laugh with every single line), it a nightmare realistic enough to make you squirm.
Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.
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