SIx of a Kind (1934)

My second recent George and Gracie feature and I find that Gracie’s persona is so broad that she needs a lot more than one single straight man. Mary Boland and Charlie Ruggles, with his acerbic responses, are there to take care of that, not that they don’t already have damn good interplay between just the two of them.

If you have to you throw Gracie in the mix a group chemistry seems to work much better. Also, George may be more sensible and fuss about Gracie’s clueless empty headedness (she apparently doesn’t even know what a map is,) but he also acts as if he’s unaware of the aggravation they are both causing the couple. (“Did I snore las night?” “I don’t know, it may have been a mountain lion.”)

The outrageous action even extends to someone falling down the Grand Canyon and their harrowing rescue.

W.C. Fields is Honest John, a sheriff and part owner (with Alison Skipworth) of a hotel in Nevada where the two couples eventually end up, (“According to you everything I like is either illegal, immoral or fattening,”) but he gets to do fine, exasperating comic pool; tend a general store where he does not sell a sweater to George Burns, and even yodel a song.

This is a better written, better paced, better set up that my previously reviewed feature, even when the plot is fairly simple and even predictable: A couple on their second honeymoon advertises for traveling companions only to encounter aggravation.

A subplot about stolen bank money (and switched grips) can be seen coming a mile away, but I can’t decide if the problem (minimal, at worst,) is that it has been used to the point of cliché since, or maybe that it was a worn-out plot device already, even this early in film history.

Gracie and George as mere supporting cast members seem more like to my taste; Gracie as leading lady as in Here Comes Cookie (1935), not so much.

Pre-Code content is minimal: One of the couples is traveling together, unmarried; there are references to bodily functions from the presence of a chamber pot to a man’s undisclosed alibi and intimations of adultery and murder (one of them true.)