During this time only W.C. Fields was showing a typical American family as a bunch of good-for-nothing, ungrateful louts, but even Fields' worst can't match a tenth of the so-called Merry Frinks. Dad is a drunken newspaperman who can't hold a job, his mother is a crotchety whiner who demands breakfast in bed while trying to sneak booze away from her son, his oldest son is a Communist constantly spouting off about the evils of capitalism, the youngest son plays hooky from school to go to prizefights and his daughter is having an affair with a married man. The only decent person in the house is long-suffering Mama Frink who waits on them and cleans up the catastrophes the Frinks leave in their wake. Her job becomes even harder when her husband's windbag uncle shows up on the doorstep from New Zealand. The cast is populated with some of Warner Brothers' best character actors of the early 1930's but the result is more outrageous than funny and after a while you just want someone to kill the family and be done with it. Director Green does provide one great camera move as Papa Frink arrives home to be pursued by his nagging relatives while walking through the entire house twice in a continuous tracking shot that must have been difficult to stage. Plus Warner's lab must have been especially bored as this film uses every optical wipe of the time.