This was included as bonus material on a disc with A Farewell to Arms. Never heard of it before, but when I had watched both the classic A Farewell to Arms, it is The Fatal Glass of Bear that I will remember.

W.C. Fields stars in this short set in the dark and cold wilderness of Canada. And he is brilliant. He delivers quirky lines ("I'll just go out and milk the elk...") with a deadpan seriousness that makes it impossible not to laugh. Or when he, for the umpteenth time, says ("It is not fit for man or beast to be out this night") and get splashed with snow in the face each time. Simple, but effective comedy.

It is a rare combination of slapstick, dialog driven farce, and detail (check out his sled-dogs) jokes. It is hard to put a label on it, but it works.

If you stumble across it, watch it!

They say that W.C. Fields was unique among comedians, and I'm not going to argue. 'The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933),' generally ranked among his best efforts, wasn't as consistently hilarious as I'd been hoping, but one does certainly recognise that Fields had a style that was all his own. The film opens in the frozen Yukon goldfields, where a prospector sits huddled in the primitive shelter of a wooden hut – I immediately thought of Chaplin in 'The Gold Rush (1925),' but then the characters started speaking and the spell was broken. The loose plot concerns a simpleton prospector whose son travelled to the city and was consumed by the bottle, eventually winding up in prison for three years. It all unfolds in mock seriousness, with every character shamelessly hamming their lines to the camera in broad, ridiculous accents. From Fields' apparent contempt for his own storyline, I'd say he was satirising a type of film that was relatively common in the early sound era, the sort of sombre morality tale about the corruption of the Big City on impressionable rural minds.

Perhaps Fields' type of comedy takes some getting used to, and his absurdist style of wit might easily be misconstrued as sloppy or stilted. Are those rear projections supposed to look so ridiculously fake? I'd like to think so, but, then again, I've seen many movies where obviously-bogus backgrounds have been used with a completely straight face. A lot of the time, Fields' lack of subtlety works perfectly. There's absolutely no reason why getting hit in the face with snow after saying "and it ain't a fit night out for man nor beast" should be funny the sixth time around, but I laughed every time it happened. There's also a droll self-referential moment when Fields chokes on the artificial snow and declares, "tastes more like cornflakes." Even so, while good for the occasional chuckle, 'The Fatal Glass of Beer' feels oddly sparse in terms of laugh-out-loud jokes, and I certainly wasn't rolling in the aisles. Straight afterwards, I watched Buster Keaton's 'Cops (1922),' and that actually did have me laughing my head off – but that'd be opening a whole new can of worms, wouldn't it?

This W.C. Fields short is eighteen minutes of inspired lunacy that deserves to be better known. It begins with Fields 'singing' a cautionary song that warns against the dangers of the city, to a Mountie in a wooden shack : "it ain't no place for women," proclaims Fields, "but pretty men go there." With that he's off home, walking along behind a dog sled that includes a dachshund whose feet never come within two feet of the ground, and in front of a backdrop that races by at an impossible speed. Repeatedly braving dashes of snow in the face as he declares "it ain't a fit night out for man nor beast", Fields is also heard to mutter knowingly that the snow "tastes more like cornflakes." The bizarre humour continues as Fields arrives home to dunk half a french loaf into his soup and discover the weather pump is so cold that the water pump is dispensing only ice cubes.

This film possibly comes closest to capturing the genius of Fields and his peculiarly unique brand of humour. There are more laughs in its short running time than most comedies five times its length. Placing his foot on a chair and leaning his elbow on his knee, Fields opines with mock seriousness that "Once the city gets into a ba-hoy's sa-histem, he a-loses his a-hankerin' for the ca-huntry." On its own it's not a funny line, but delivered by Fields at the height of his powers it will provide you with your biggest laugh for weeks.