So's Your Old Man (1926)
A small-town glazier's unbreakable-glass invention leads to a disastrous demonstration and a botched suicide attempt on a train, where he inadvertently rescues a European princess.
“So’s Your Old Man” was W. C. Fields’s first great starring vehicle at Paramount, built around the small-time-dreamer persona he refined for the rest of his career, and he remade it as a talkie in 1934 under the title You’re Telling Me! The film entered the National Film Registry in 2008.
Background
“So’s Your Old Man” is a 1926 silent comedy directed by Gregory La Cava, released October 25, 1926, and shot at Astoria Studios in Queens. W. C. Fields stars as Samuel Bisbee, a small-town inventor and local embarrassment convinced his new unbreakable glass windshield will finally make his fortune. The script, credited to J. Clarkson Miller and adapted by Howard Emmett Rogers from Julian Leonard Street’s story “Mr. Bisbee’s Princess,” sends Bisbee’s invention to a disastrous public demonstration and pushes him, humiliated, toward a botched suicide attempt on a train, where he unexpectedly ends up rescuing a European princess, played by Alice Joyce.
What to watch for
The film gave Fields his first great starring vehicle at Paramount, establishing the small-time dreamer, forever undone by bad luck and his own schemes, that he would keep refining for the rest of his career. He returned to the material directly in 1934, remaking it as a talkie under the title You’re Telling Me!, with much of the same plot intact. The Library of Congress added the original to the National Film Registry in 2008, recognizing it as an early, fully formed statement of the Fields persona.
