Review of The Old Fashioned Way

There's genuinely little in the way of plot but tons of laughs anyway in this gaslight era study of a traveling theater group and the various scrapes they get into thanks to their leading comic W.C. Fields. One of three films in which Fields encountered Baby LeRoy, this is famous for the sequence where Fields gets delicious revenge on the prankster tot. It is also extremely memorable for the scene where he romances a wealthy but untalented singer (Jan Dugan) and the finale during the show within the show where he performs his hysterically funny juggling act. The typical young romance is there (between actor Joe Morrison and Judith Allen, playing Fields' daughter) , but when Fields is off-screen, the film sags, but only a bit because he's on for most of it.