So’s Your Old Man **** (1926, W C Fields, Alice Joyce, Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers) – Classic Movie Review 9779

Director Gregory La Cava 1926 comedy So’s Your Old Man is one of W C Fields’s best silent comedies, in which he plays Mr Samuel Bisbee, a tippling glazier and henpecked husband, who takes his unbreakable glass invention to Washington, is rejected, but meets kindly Spanish princess, Princess Lescaboura (Alice Joyce) on the train home.

Fields is on top form, and an unusual degree of care and effort go into the story and production, adding up to vintage silent comedy.

In a good support cast, Marcia Harris is Fields’s wife Mrs Bisbee, Kittens Reichert is his daughter Alice Bisbee and Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers is Ken Murchison.

It is written by J Clarkson Miller (screenplay), Julian Johnson (titles) and Howard Emmett Rogers (adaptation), based on the 1925 O’Henry prize-winning short story Mr Bisbee’s Princess by Julian Leonard Street.

Also in the cast are Julia Ralph as Mrs Murchison, Frank Montgomery as Jeff, Jerry Sinclair, William Shorty Blanche, Frederick Burton (as Senator, uncredited), Charles Byer and Walter Walker.

It is filmed at Astoria Studios in Queens, New York City.

So’s Your Old Man is remade as a talkie in 1934 as You’re Telling Me!, again with W C Fields.

So’s Your Old Man was added to the United States National Film Registry in 2008.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 9779

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