Tillie and Gus (1933)

User Rating:

7.5/10   

Director:

Francis Martin

Writers:

Walter DeLeon (writer)
Rupert Hughes (story)

Release Date:

13 October 1933 (USA)

Genre:

Comedy

Plot:

Tillie and Augustus Winterbottom are thought to be missionaries when they arrive to find Phineas Pratt...

Plot Keywords:

Missionary | Boat Race

Cast

W.C. Fields	...	Augustus Q. Winterbottom
Alison Skipworth	...	Tillie Winterbottom
Baby LeRoy	...	The 'King'
Julie Bishop	...	Mary Sheridan (as Jacqueline Wells)
Phillip Trent	...	Tom Sheridan (as Clifford Jones)
Clarence Wilson	...	Phineas Pratt
George Barbier	...	Captain Fogg
Barton MacLane	...	Commissioner McLennan
Edgar Kennedy	...	The Judge
Robert McKenzie	...	Defense Attorney
Ivan Linow	...	The Swede

Runtime:

58 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Noiseless Recording)

Filming Locations:

Malibou Lake, Agoura, California, USA

Company:

Paramount Pictures

Trivia:

One of over 700 Paramount Productions, filmed between 1929 and 1949, which were sold to MCA/Universal in 1958 for television distribution, and have been owned and controlled by Universal ever since.

Quotes:

Mary Sheridan: You two are angels straight from heaven!
Augustus Q. Winterbottom: [coughs] We detoured slightly on the way.

One of Fields' "sleepers", Tillie and Gus is a great curiosity.

"Tillie And Gus" is a "Sleeper" for W.C. Fields. It is not one of his movies that he is best remembered for, but it has several components that make it a great curiosity. First of all, Fields is teamed up again with Alison Skipworth, the craggy character actress, who in her earlier stage career in England was known to be a great beauty. She is also as far as I'm concerned, Fields' greatest female co-star. She interacts with him well as she did in "If I Had A Million" and "Six of A Kind". The two are formerly man and wife in this saga, working as "missionaries" on different locations who are found out for their flim-flam ways and sent packing back home where they are summoned to the dockside of a niece, her husband and infant son (Baby Leroy), who are being swindled out of their inheritance by shyster lawyer Phineas Pratt. The niece owns a run-down riverboat, threatened to be put in mothballs by a newer boat. A race is run to determine which boat has superiority over the other, and who keeps the river franchise. Fields' and Skipworth's goals is to help win the race, receive the money to thwart Pratt, and to kick the bum out! Memorable scenes include The "Missionaries" working together to refix a poker game on the train to their benefit, and Fields' memorable line to the question "You like children?". "Only if they are properly cooked", he says. This film is seldom seen on television and never seen as a video. The rights to this and many other Fields' films are buried in the vaults of Universal Pictures. It should be released for all of us to see again.