W.C. Fields is one of my many gods of cinema. I've probably seen more of his films than most people, since I compulsively watched (and taped) all of his movies when he was TCM's Star of the Month last June. In fact, I did get a little sick of him from overexposure, and there are several I still need to watch. I just got the Criterion "6 Short Films" disc and watched the only two of them I hadn't seen, including The Pool Sharks. Well, this one is pretty lame. It's his first film, and it's a silent one. You would be absolutely right in thinking that the medium of silent films doesn't suit The Great Man at all. All this film is is gross slapstick. Some of it is funny, but nothing hilarious. It's very well worth seeing, especially for the surreal stop-motion animated pool ball scene. It's actually very difficult to tell what's going on in that sequence, but it looks neat. And if you watch it frame by frame, you will notice a goof: the animator's hands are caught in one of the shots on the left side of the screen! 6/10.
Review of Pool Sharks
