Six of a Kind is an American 1934 pre-Code comedy film directed by Leo McCarey and starring Charles Ruggles, Mary Boland, W.C. Fields, George Burns, and Gracie Allen.

[1] A critical and box office success, Six of a Kind features the famous pocket billiards (pool) playing scene in which Fields explains how he got the name “Honest John”.

Flora, a housewife, and “Pinky,” a bank clerk, have normalized the exchange of petty insults during their marriage, rituals that have obscured expression of their genuine affection.

In the remote mining town, the McWhinneys take rooms at the local hotel presided over by proprietress Mrs. K. Rumford known as “The Duchess.” She suspects the couple of being indigent because they are cash-strapped and places their valise under lock and key in case they depart without paying.

[8] Actor W. C. Fields registered a complaint with Paramount executives that his character, Sheriff “Honest John” Hoxley, did not appear until late into the screenplay, providing him with less material than the other players.

Directed with expert calculation.”[14] The opening credit sequence introduces the six central characters with images of playing cards—each a joker—and cuts to portraits coupling Ruggles with Boland, Burns with Allen, and Fields with Skipworth.

Poague notes that, thematically, “the metaphor is clear,” namely “You can go to far (literally, ‘out on a limb’) in accommodating yourself to convention (having your picture taken), and if you go far enough your very life will be endangered.”[17][18] In a demonstration of W. C. Fields’ “marvelous pantomime,” the actor reprises the vaudeville skit he conceived in 1905. and had famously performed for the Ziegfeld Follies.

[23] Fields ineptitude as a lawman contributes to the salvation of the Whinneys, as his delays and diversions lead to the capture of the criminal Ferguson and the couples’ exoneration.

[25] Film critic Leland Poague writes: Six of a Kind shows us the other side of McCarey’s comic coin, for it focuses on characters who are tested by the intrusion of the unconventional into their otherwise over-conventional lives.

D. Gehring, Six of a Kind introduced a soon popular “on-the-road”-themed story which appeared in filmmaker Frank Capra’s 1934 romance-comedy It Happened One Night starring Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable.