It’s a Gift

Harold Bissonette owns a small-town grocery store in New Jersey, running the daily gauntlet of his nagging wife, demanding daughter, loud-mouthed son, prudish townspeople, blind or just plain ornery customers, and of course, Baby LeRoy. But when his rich uncle Bean dies, Harold can at last realize his dream of owning an orange grove in California.
From this unpromising material the genius of W. C. Fields fashioned one of the most sheerly funny comedies Hollywood ever produced. In it, the Fields persona was honed to perfection: the misanthropic curmudgeon, nursing his small triumphs over the women and small children who beset him, managing, however improbably, to transorm disaster into success.
Simon Louvish has performed a splendid work of excavation in tracing back the origins in Fields' stage work of the wonderful set pieces from which the film is constructed. But in dissecting the origins and techniques of the routines, Louvish does not murder the comedy, for his descriptions of Fields at work recreate the joy of watching the most anarchic and original comic Hollywood ever discovered.