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List Price: $29.95Amazon.com's Price: $22.49 You Save: $7.46 (25%)Prices subject to change.
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Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Audience Rating: Unrated
Binding: DVD
Brand: Image Entertainment
EAN: 9781559409056
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC
ISBN: 1559409053
Label: Criterion
Manufacturer: Criterion
Number Of Items: 1
Picture Format: Pan & Scan
Publisher: Criterion
Region Code: 1
Release Date: August 22, 2000
Running Time: 115 minutes
Sales Rank: 12273
Studio: Criterion
Theatrical Release Date: July 28, 1933
Editorial Review:
Description:
W. C. Fields' prolific career placed him at the forefront of slapstick comedy. Gathered here are six gems that feature the comic genius at his peak: The Golf Specialist, Pool Sharks (silent), The Pharmacist, The Fatal Glass of Beer, The Barber Shop, and, of course, the notorious The Dentist. This unique collection will delight new generations of viewers with Fields' hilariously sardonic routines.
Amazon.com:
Ten years elapsed between W.C. Fields's debut in the 1915 short 'The Pool Sharks' and his role in D.W. Griffith's Sally of the Sawdust, but it didn't take long for Fields to become one of the all-time great screen comedians. This essential collection--the silent 'The Pool Sharks' plus the five 'two-reeler' sound shorts that established Fields's acerbic style--provides a comprehensive document of the comedian's work in progress. 'The Pool Sharks' develops a routine that Fields created in vaudeville and later perfected on film, with stop-motion animation used here to realize the comedian's wacky luck at billiards. It's a clever appetizer, but Fields was a verbal comic, so the two-reelers are the full-course meal.
Like the Marx brothers' The Cocoanuts a year earlier, 1930's 'The Golf Specialist' mines humor from high jinks in sunny Florida, where Fields is nearly upstaged by a stone-faced golf caddy. The classic 'The Dentist,' despite the later addition of strident musical cues, is presented in its entirety, including an oft-censored bit in which Fields tugs a molar from a woman who's wrapped around him in a highly suggestive position. 'The Pharmacist' and 'The Barbershop' are variations on the theme, allowing Fields to toss off bons mots and scathing sarcasm, but it's the anomalous 'The Fatal Glass of Beer'--a hilarious send-up of Yukon gold-rush adventures--that proves an unlikely highlight. It's typically sour-pussed in its agenda, with a running gag (involving the line 'It ain't a fit night out for man nor beast') that just grows funnier with each repetition. Fields's comedy wasn't fully developed here--he became masterful in later features--but 6 Short Films is crucial in demonstrating his rapid refinement of the vintage Fields persona. --Jeff Shannon
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Great W.C. Fields - but only mediocre production by Criterion
This is the best available version of these great masterpieces by W.C. Fields.
The only drawback is the version of "The Dentist" that Criterion has chosen. It has some inauthentic music added to a few scenes - Fields struggling with the block of ice, and the scene wherein he knocks an "old geezer" on the head with a golf ball. This cartoon-like music really detracts from the flow of the film. Criterion could have and should have done better.
To get the original soundtrack for "The Dentist" ... Read More
Rating: - W.C. Fields: 6 Short Films - Criterion Collection
I purchased this DVD for my wheel-chair bound older brother who by the way has become increasingly pickier about everything in his older age. He has seen all 6 shorts on VHS but as noted previously the quality wasn't up to his standards. Well, he loved the DVD, couldn't thank me enough. He tried to find W.C. Fields DVD at the local library and video rental firms, no luck. So not only did he like the quality, I really enjoyed the convenience of Amazon.com as he and I live about 100 miles apart and I ... Read More
Rating: - The City ain't no place for Women-Gals, but Pretty Men go Thar.....
To look at W.C.Fields in the context of his contemporaries is to be amazed at the fame and popularity of a character that was really quite subversive: he smoked, drank, cursed, avoided hard work, lied, scammed, detested marriage and family life, abused underlings, and held every politically incorrect attitude imaginable. The Fields persona was irrascible, blustery, grandiose, and prone to wrong assumptions; all the while being harrassed by nagging wives, bratty children, an obnoxious public, disparaging ... Read More
Rating:  - "The Dentist" censorship
As has already been noted, "The Dentist" is largely sourced from some later reissue with added, completely unnecessary music and sound effects. While the notoriously naughty tooth-pulling scene has been put back in, at least two other more subtle bits of censorship remain:
1. When the female patient is moaning in the waiting room and the Fields' assistant is trying to get his attention, Fields originally says "Oh, the hell with her!" In this version, that outburst is covered (rather sloppily) ... Read More
Rating:  - Criterion Collection Stunk!
The above entitled collection was a real disappointment. Not at all what I expected and definitely not worth the money. Quite frankly, I was so disappointed I threw them in the trash. I know there has to be good W.C. Fields films out there, however W.C. Fields: 6 Short Films-Criterion Collection is not one of them
Bill Williams
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