It's a Gift (1934)
★★½ — It's a Gift (1934)
For anyone with even a passing interest in American comedy of the 1930s, It's a Gift occupies a peculiar, fondly regarded corner of the decade's output. Released by Paramount Pictures in 1934, the film follows Harold Bissonette (that's "bis-on-ay", as he insists) through a catalogue of domestic trials: a shrewish wife, a crumbling grocery business, and an ill-advised plan to up sticks and run an orange grove in California on the back of a modest inheritance. The premise is thin by design, serving chiefly as a washing line on which to hang a series of comic set-pieces built around one man's strained patience with everyone around him.
Norman Z. McLeod directed, and by this point he was well practised in the art of getting out of a comedian's way. He had already worked with the Marx Brothers on Monkey Business (1931), and that hands-off, performance-led approach is visible here too. The film runs a brisk 68 minutes, which in theory ought to keep things clipping along, and it carries the no-nonsense Paramount house polish of the period: competent, functional, occasionally very funny on paper. The script draws loosely on Fields' own earlier stage and screen work, including his 1925 silent short It's the Old Army Game, and the sense that you are watching material carefully road-tested over years is never far away. Kathleen Howard plays the long-suffering (or, depending on your perspective, entirely reasonably frustrated) wife Amelia with a sharp, clipped authority, while Baby LeRoy, the toddler who famously clashed with Fields both on and off camera, features among the supporting cast. Jean Rouverol and Julian Madison round out the family.
Fields himself, of course, is the whole show. A vaudevillian turned silent comedian turned sound-era character actor, he had by 1934 refined his screen persona to something recognisably his own: the put-upon everyman with a fondness for mild deception and a bone-deep suspicion of children, animals, and authority figures in that order. If you want to see what he could do in a more freewheeling context, his later The Bank Dick (1940) is worth a look alongside this one. For a broader sense of what Hollywood comedy was doing in the years either side of this film, there is also my look at The Invisible Man (1933), another Paramount-adjacent production from just a year earlier that shows how varied the studio's output was in this period, or indeed The 39 Steps (1935) for a sense of the transatlantic comedic sensibility the following year.
It's a Gift (1934) finds W.C. Fields at his most quintessentially silly. A put-upon family man besieged by nagging relatives, incompetent salesmen, and the general indignities of domestic life. There's undeniable craft in Fields' performance: his slow-burn exasperation, his masterful timing with props, and that world-weary drawl remain impressive nearly a century on. The famous grocery store sequence still lands with a certain mechanical precision, and the film's gentle satire of middle-class frustration retains a flicker of relevance. Yet judged purely as comedy, it's more admirable than uproarious. The pacing meanders, the gags rely heavily on repetition, and much of the humour feels rooted in a very specific 1930s sensibility that doesn't always translate. It's the kind of film you can comfortably have on for a lazy afternoon (pleasant, historically interesting, and utterly inoffensive) but it rarely provokes more than a wry smile. A perfectly serviceable slice of pre-war slapstick that earns mild amusement without ever threatening to make you laugh out loud. It's a historical curio rather than a comedic revelation. Polite chuckles only.
So where does that leave It's a Gift on the shelf? For me, it sits comfortably in the category of films I am glad exist and glad I have seen, but would hesitate to press on anyone who wasn't already disposed to enjoy pre-war American comedy on its own terms. There is pleasure in watching a craftsman at work, and Fields is undeniably that, but pleasure and laughter are not quite the same thing. If you are building your way through the era chronologically, this is a reasonable stop on the tour. If you are after something that will actually make you laugh rather than nod appreciatively, you might want to look elsewhere first. A footnote worth reading, just not the chapter itself.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1934 | Watched: 2026-04-03
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Norman Z. McLeod: Monkey Business (1931)
More with W.C. Fields: The Bank Dick (1940)
More from the 1930s: Earth (1930) · Monkey Business (1931) · Sabotage (1936) · People on Sunday (1930)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
