W.C. Fields in 'It's A Gift' (1934) - Blind Man with Cane

Fred's sensitive and humorous blog detailing his volunteer work helping members of a convention of legally-blind folks brought me to mind one of the best scenes from W.C. Fields' classic film, "It's A Gift".

The story concerns a harassed husband/shop owner who comes into some unexpected money and heads west to California to buy a small orange farm. Of course, all turns out not so well. Like "The Bank Dick" (1940) and "Man on the Flying Trapeze" (1935), Fields plays a quietly desperate man-on-the-ropes who is set upon by forces like pushy shop customers screaming for service, anal bill collectors, snoopy accountants, cops, cranky mothers-in-law and small children. He is an Everyman who is rapidly losing ground and perhaps his sanity, yet, in the end, never gives in to conformity.
The story behind the scene is that Fields--who wrote the screenplay based in part on some of his old vaudeville routines--bet a friend at Paramount Pictures that he could create a scene that would include a old blind man at the center of the gags and still make people laugh.

Fields made some of his best films playing long-suffering heads-of-households with very critical wives and nasty in-laws. He also scored as a Class-A wandering reprobate in such films as "Poppy"(1936) and "You Can't Cheat an Honest Man"(1939). Never a man to let work interfere with his "drinking, smoking, cheating at cards and reading the Police Gazette"", his characters were very popular with frustrated Depression-Era audiences and, after his death, with anti-establishment sympathizers in the Sixties and Seventies who saw in Mr. Fields an old school avuncular rebel who fought the forces of pretension and conformity to at least a draw.

The Blind Man was played by Charles Sellon.