@deanduncan63Saw #ItsaGift. A serious candidate for the greatest screen comedy in the history of the medium.
#ItsaGift is painfully funny in a number of ways. It’s an exemplary piece of comic craftsmanship, effective in a number of styles & registers …
… Conceptually, thematically, even morally, it resonates to the point of being deeply & multiply meaningful …
… It is, in fact, a work of great truth & profundity.
#ItsaGift gives the lie to so many of those W.C. Fields clichés. Far from being a child-hating lush …
… this character emerges as a comical but still oh-so plausible, even inspiring modern manifestation of Job himself.
#ItsaGift. A Modern Job maybe. Not so sure the final restoration is really such a happy thing!
#ItsaGift. Kathleen Howard, as Fields’ stentorian, positively Wagnerian wife, gives one of comedy’s very greatest performances …
… Fields plays off her perfectly. This domesticity is past dire, but in the perfection of its portrayal it is practically paradisiacal.
#ItsaGift. Note the agonizing & utterly intentional duration of these comic sequences. The trying-to-get-to-sleep centrepiece is right up there …
… w’ L & H’s big flight of stairs in illustrating, in a manner practically mythological, that man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards.