Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Tilly and Gus!

Would you buy a boat from this man?

As movie genres go, comedy is deader than the western. I couldn't even name a comedy movie released this decade, much less one worth watching. Perhaps Judd Apatow killed it with his sub-Paranormal Activity levels of effort in sitting SNL also-rans in a room and having them exchange improv not funny enough to get laughs and blow the take, then calling it a movie. An ignominious end to a genre that was at the forefront of innovation back in the silent age. The action genre never got close to producing anything as good as Girl Shy's chase scene until 1980, and Keaton and Lloyd pioneered test screening to fine-tune their routines for maximum laughs in what was then an admirably humble act of deference to populist taste, not the pantomime of corporate greed and soulless incloosion we think of now.

Test audiences now: omg this is giving me anxiety, change everything at once!
Test audiences then: throw a real baby in the ocean bitch, i dare you

While the dawn of the talkies at least temporarily (I'm being kind) retarded the artform in general, comedy stayed strong into the 1930s thanks to a small number of vaudeville veterans stepping up to the plate. The Marx Brothers took full advantage of sound technology to engage in rapid-fire wordplay, but W.C. Fields best kept the torch of silent-era setpiece shenanigans held high. To the extent that he indulges in verbosity, it often sounds like he's just mumbling to himself, and he was often known to show up drunk on set and wing it.

His movies often drop a fully-formed routine into the mix with the bare minimum of plot relevancy because it's funny, sort of like a vignette in a Godard flick except the audience enjoys it too.

While Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo had fixed personas, Fields's character lurched arbitrarily from hapless sitcom dad to slick trickster archetype to slovenly funny drunk to sharp-tongued cynic from one film to the next and sometimes in the course of a single vehicle. His charismatic comic DNA can be found in iterations from Homer Simpson to Basil Fawlty to Tony Soprano, making him somehow the Ghengis Khan of iconic characters. Against all probability, yet forged inevitably through his rigorous tours of duty on the vaudeville circuit, it all worked and gelled into a sort of avatar of entertainment itself, a carnival barker at the gates of cinéma.

Pls make like a duck and wipe your feet on entry.

To be honest, most Fieldskinos could qualify for Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week, but there's not much you can write about a comedy except to give away the jokes, so we may choose to let this stand in for the ouevre as a whole. At a 55 minute runtime as slim as its star is not, Tilly and Gus might be the most concentrated distillation of the Fields picture. There's no time for the charming musical detours that give that variety-show flavour to other entries, just an amble through comic scenarios that culminates in a high-stakes steam boat race. Watch Tilly and Gus today.