Never Give a Sucker an Even Break

Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941)

It's a Fields-day of fun!

Never Give a Sucker an Even Break is a 1941 film about a man who wants to sell a film story to Esoteric Studios. On the way he gets insulted by little boys, beaten up for ogling a woman, and abused by a waitress. W. C. Fields' last starring role in a feature-length film.

Date of release
1941-10-10
TMDB
6.9 / 10 (42)
Runtime
1h 11m
Genres
Comedy
Director
Edward F. Cline

Casting

Interesting facts

Never Give a Sucker an Even Break is a 1941 American comedy film directed by Edward F. Cline and starring W. C. Fields, Gloria Jean, and Leon Errol. Fields also wrote the original story, under the pseudonym Otis Criblecoblis. Fields plays himself, promoting an extravagant screenplay he has written. As he describes the script to a skeptical producer, the often surreal scenes are shown. It was produced and distributed by Universal Pictures.

Production

Fields' preferred title for the film was The Great Man, which also had been his original title for The Bank Dick, but this title again was rejected by Universal. When the title was changed, Fields was afraid that "Never Give a Sucker an Even Break" would not fit on theater marquees, and it would be abbreviated to "W. C. Fields - Sucker".

Fields' first version of the script was only 12 pages long; Universal told him to expand it, which Fields' did, to 96 pages. This was still not enough, so Fields hired screenwriters John T. Neville and Prescott Chaplin to expand it. This version came in at 156 pages.

Fields did sneak in a gag that got around The Breen Office's edict that a "raspberry sound" could not be made onscreen; the scene featured a fruit peddler crying "Raspberries!" as a leaky tire on his cart spurted jets of air that resembled the forbidden sound.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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