Saw It's a Gift, a W C Fields comedy about a grocer who wants to move out to the sunny orange groves of California. In the manner of comedies, the plot is secondary to vignettes of relatable suffering and bad behavior. The film is okay, but prepare for some tame, old-timey fun.
The main drawback of this film is just how unpleasant every character is. I'm used to seeing W C Fields as a sort of rogue character, a con man or grifter. Here he's the straight man, humorously under-reacting to his proud wife, his flirty daughter, his bratty son. But absolutely everything goes wrong in this guy's life. Simply trying to shave becomes a test of ingenuity and dexterity as he dances around his family's interruptions. A day at work leaves the grocery in a ruin. This is all played for laughs, but I began wondering why this grocer guy didn't just leave. Just walk down the road and continue until he died from exhaustion. Surely that would be better than being perpetually tormented like this.
The film is okay, but a little aged. There's nothing very objectionable about it, but it leans heavily on the comedy of enduring through suffering, which I get tired of pretty quickly. I enjoyed the film okay, but it was a little tame and staid by modern standards.
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