Never Give a Sucker an Even Break is a 1941 American comedy film directed by Edward F. Cline and starring W. C. Fields, Gloria Jean, and Leon Errol.

At the Hollywood studios of Esoteric Pictures, Fields, playing himself, is seen admiring a billboard advertising his previous film The Bank Dick (1940).

He encounters various hecklers and minor calamities, including a rude, sassy diner waitress (Jody Gilbert), he calls "Blimpy Pie."

His devoted niece Gloria Jean is on her way to rehearse some songs at the studio, where she demonstrates her classically trained coloratura soprano.

Fields has run-ins with a couple of eccentric characters in which he tangles with a large, angry man in the lower berth and manages to hit him with a mallet and convince him that someone else did it.

At one point, Gloria Jean asks Uncle Bill why he never married, and he answers "I was in love with a beautiful blonde once, dear.

He lands safely in a "nest" high atop a cliff, a home populated by a beautiful, young, naive girl (Susan Miller) and her cynical mother (Margaret Dumont).

Fields is about to marry Dumont when Gloria Jean takes him aside and convinces him that this is a bad idea, and they make a swift exit.

At the studio, when Gloria Jean learns Fields has been sent away, she tells the flustered Pangborn that she will quit if her uncle is fired.

He speeds her through the streets and expressways of Los Angeles, where he tangles with pedestrians, cars, and a hook-and-ladder fire truck.

[4] This was the version of the script that was rejected in April 1941 by the Hays Office because it was "filled with vulgar and suggestive scenes and dialogue" and had "innumerable jocular references to drinking and liquor," the producer was referred to as a "pansy", and the Fields character ogled women's breasts and legs.

He was inclined to "throw it in their faces", but director Eddie Cline told him not to—he would shoot Fields's own script, and the studio wouldn't know the difference, which was the case.

After the positive reception of Fields' previous Universal picture, The Bank Dick, the studio had touted The Great Man as one of its major features of the year, to be released during the holiday season of 1941.

"By keeping the film as nonsensical as possible, like [Olsen and Johnson's] Hellzapoppin', Universal could bridge Fields's chaotic continuity and gloss over his occasional absences.

"[4] Upon release, columnist Ted Strauss in The New York Times wrote "We are not yet quite sure that this latest opus is even a movie – no such harum-scarum collection of song, slapstick and thumbnail sketches has defied dramatic law in recent history.