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accidentally drops a bottle of whisky overboard and without hesitation dives over after it, landing on top of a mountain, where dwell a Mrs. Hemoglobin and her daughter, Ouliotta. Fields teaches the daughter a kissing game but leaps off the mountain when her mother wants to play. He continues to Mexico City, picks up his niece and several other members of the cast, who wander in and out at irrelevant times, and returns to the mountain, having heard that Mrs. Hemoglobin is wealthy. Although he woos her with seedy elegance, she is won by a rival wooden nutmeg salesman. Eventually, we learn that most of the foregoing was the story Fields was trying, in the first scene, to sell the producer.
The Universal heads, when presented with this $25,000 epic, successfully concealed their excitement. One man felt that the plot, though fascinating, was thin; another came out flatfooted and said that, in spots, it even sounded bizarre. Still another ventured to surmise that the title, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, would fit onto no theater marquee known to be in existence anywhere in the world at that time. Fields declined their comments. He hoped, he said, that the title would prove unwieldy and that the announcement would be abbreviated, everywhere, to read, simply, "W. G. Fields — Sucker." As to the plot, he pointed out, with some justification, that it was every bit as powerful and realistic as his story The Bank Dick, which he wrote under his alternate pen name of Mahatma Kane Jeeves, and as You Can't Cheat an Honest Man, for which he received another screen credit under his third alternate pen name of Charles Bogle. The first of these creations hinged on his successful campaign to induce his prospective son-in-law, a bank clerk, to embezzle $500 for investment in a beefsteak mine, and the second was concerned with the efforts of Fields, as Larson E. Whipsnade, a circus owner, to get his show across a state line before the sheriff caught him.