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Gloria Jean is a successful actress and singer with Esoteric Studios,
and in that capacity she is able to get her uncle W.C. Fields an
appointment with the studio's producer (Franklin Pangborn) to pitch his
latest script. The script is wild beyond belief, since it has Fields and
Gloria Jean travelling over Russia in a plane with sun deck, and
eventually Fields falls off the sun deck 10,000 feet right onto the bed of
a pretty girl (Susan Miller) that stops his fall. The girl lives on a
reclusive mountain top guarded by a gorilla (Emil Van Horn) with her
mother (Margaret Dumont) and has never seen a man ... and soon enough,
Fields tricks her into kissing him. Doing this, they are caught by her
mother, who wants to be kissed by Fields, too, but he's so turned off by
her looks that he makes a hasty escape down the mountain. In the valley
below, Fields is reunited with his niece - but also learns that the ugly
mother owns a great fortune, so he and his niece make it up the mountain
again with a priest to marry Fields to the mother ... only to make another
escape once Gloria Jean reminds Fields that in order to get his hands on
her money, he has to live with the mother for the rest of his life. The
producere is furious about the stupidity of Fields' script and throws him
out. Gloria Jean, who loves her uncle more than her career, leaves the
premises with him though. Driving to God-knows-where, Fields picks up a
woman on her way to the maternity ward of the hospital, and Fields
automatically assumes she's pregnant (she's not) and races her to the
hospital in a sequence that involves a firetruck and several police
motorbikes, and that wrecks half the cars of the city, including Fields'
own. But even that can't shatter Gloria Jean's belief in her uncle ... Objectively
speaking, this film is a mess, it's narrative structure is all wrong, the
film falls into little more than loosely to not-at-all connected
sequences, the film-within-a-film makes no sense in itself or in the
context of the plot, and the finale (the carchase scene) seems to be
tagged on rather than caused by preceding events. All that is objectively
speaking of course ... but you really can't watch a comedy objectively,
now can you? True, all of aobve points are absolutely correct, but they
don't say anything about the brilliant comedy that was worked into the
patchwork plot (including several scenes fields isn't even in) and about
the incredibly well-conceived (and wickedly funny) chase scene at the end
of the film. Sure, the film's script could have done with some polish, but
maybe that would have ruined the comedy rather than made the film better
... Anyways, watch it as it is, you won't be disappointed.
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