Much of the analysis I have about WC Fields is in the first section of this blog (see link above) Here in the second part I want simply to play a couple of his most popular comic sketches. The quality speaks for itself.
(above ) W.C. in a candid shot at a Hollywood party is joined by another timeless comedian, Groucho Marx (sans his trademark greasepaint mustache. ), likely sometime around 1933-4 when they both were under contract with Paramount Pictures.Whatever they are talking about must have been funny.
(below) Fields has a cameo role along with several other Paramount comedians (including George Burns and Gracie Allen) in an early screwball vehicle called 'Six of a Kind" in 1933.
Here he plays small town Nevada sheriff named Honest John. The material here is based on a portion of a vaudeville routine with a special pool table that Fields used in his live act.
Interestingly Fields starred in many silent films although its hard to imagine him without his trademark voice. His first silent film was a knockabout short called "Pool Sharks" in 1915. (See the photo at the top of this page.) The film itself is only of interest as a curiosity for the 35 year old Fields is just a wise guy fighting over a girl with another potential suitor and there's a good deal of trick photography in the pool game scenes. . There's apparently none of that here.
Below: W.C. Fields first starring talking feature, 1934's "It's A Gift". This classic bit inspired a lot of comedians, including John Cleese of Monty Python who worked the idea of a set-upon proprietor into his frustrated English hotelier series "Fawlty Towers". Cleese acknowledged Fields as his favorite sound-era comedian.
Was there ever a comedian more in tune with the dissatisfactions of domestic life in America than one William Claude Dukenfield? Born in 1880 near Philadelphia, he later came to be known simply as W.C. Fields to his legions of fans and later as "Uncle Claude" to his younger friends and just plain Bill to his older peers. His father was an immigrant from Sheffield, England, who went on to serve in the Union Army during the Civil War. His mother was of German heritage.
Yes I do like children ... Girl children...about eighteen or twenty.
'Twas a woman who drove me to drink, and I never had the courtesy to thank her for it.
Sex isn't necessary. You don't die without it, but you can die having it.
I never drink anything stronger than gin before breakfast.
The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep.
If at first you don't succeed, try, try, and try again. Then give up. There's no use being a damned fool about it.
Start every day with a smile and get it over with.
A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money.
Once ... in the wilds of Afghanistan, I lost my corkscrew, and we were forced to live on nothing but food and water for days.
I feel like a midget with muddy feet have been walking over my tongue all night.
Madam, there's no such thing as a tough child - if you parboil them first for seven hours, they always come out tender.
You're drunk! Yeah, and you're crazy. And I'll be sober tomorrow and you'll be crazy for the rest of your life.
The only thing a lawyer won't question is the legitimacy of his mother.
It's hard to tell where Hollywood ends and the D.T.'s begin.
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Fields began his career in show business as a juggler. He liked to say he ran away form home at 11 or 12 years of age but the truth was he had a talent for "eccentric juggling" and after making a success at talent and church shows around Philadelphia, he took an offer to go on the vaudeville circuit at 18 with the apparent blessing of his parents.
He was such a good juggler that he played not only all over the world in major vaudeville and music hall bookings but in special engagements for European Royalty, including Edward VII and family at Buckingham Palace.
(The clip above is from "The Old Fashioned Way" in 1934. It is the only film clip of Fields' doing one of his complete stage juggling acts.)
Fields was an autodidact and very well-read. Before going on an engagement to Australia he read so much on the young country when he arrived there in 1910 that journalists who interviewed him were impressed that he knew more about the country than most of its regular inhabitants.
Fields married his female assistant, Hattie Fields, around 1900. She grew tired of the constant travel of a stage performer. She wanted Fields to settle down in one place and get a regular job. That was a deal breaker for "Claude Dukenfield" as he was known as a young man. He stayed on tour and his wife and he separated around 1907. They had a son, also named WC Fields, who was estranged from his father during his youth. Fields blamed Hattie for poisoning the young man's opinion of his father. In most of Fields "domestic" films (where he plays the put-upon head of a dysfunctional household) it is always the older women--wives and mothers-in-law-- who are shrewish toward him, a legacy of his unhappy domestic situation.
Fields also started getting roles in legitimate theater around the time he and Hattie separated. He went on to star in "The Zigfield Follies" in the 1920's with such other major stars as Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice and Will Rogers. He started appearing in silent films as well, directed by the likes of DW Griffith and his longtime friend Gregory La Cava.
One of W.C.s favorite authors was Charles Dickens. Fields wanderings about in show business as a young man made him identify with the likes of David Copperfield and Oliver Twist. One of his favorite roles in films was as a co-star in a 1935 MGM version of "David Copperfield" as none other than Mr. Micawber, a perfect role for him It was the only major role Fields ever played on screen where he didn't try to improve the dialogue of his scenes.
Here's Fields in his 1939 comedy "You Can't Cheat An Honest Man". He plays Larson E. Whipsnade, a carnival owner and reprobate. (This was the other type of role Fields played in films, besides the henpecked husband.) Almost all of Fields comedies were either written by him or in collaboration with others. He used the alias Charles Bogle or Mahatma Kane Jeeves for his gag and scenario writing at the film studios. When Whipsnade's son is about to marry into a high society family, the young man makes the mistake of bringing his iconoclastic father along to a party.
Fred's sensitive and humorous blog detailing his volunteer work helping members of a convention of legally-blind folks brought me to mind one of the best scenes from W.C. Fields' classic film, "It's A Gift".
The story concerns a harassed husband/shop owner who comes into some unexpected money and heads west to California to buy a small orange farm. Of course, all turns out not so well. Like "The Bank Dick" (1940) and "Man on the Flying Trapeze" (1935), Fields plays a quietly desperate man-on-the-ropes who is set upon by forces like pushy shop customers screaming for service, anal bill collectors, snoopy accountants, cops, cranky mothers-in-law and small children. He is an Everyman who is rapidly losing ground and perhaps his sanity, yet, in the end, never gives in to conformity. The story behind the scene is that Fields--who wrote the screenplay based in part on some of his old vaudeville routines--bet a friend at Paramount Pictures that he could create a scene that would include a old blind man at the center of the gags and still make people laugh.
Fields made some of his best films playing long-suffering heads-of-households with very critical wives and nasty in-laws. He also scored as a Class-A wandering reprobate in such films as "Poppy"(1936) and "You Can't Cheat an Honest Man"(1939). Never a man to let work interfere with his "drinking, smoking, cheating at cards and reading the Police Gazette"", his characters were very popular with frustrated Depression-Era audiences and, after his death, with anti-establishment sympathizers in the Sixties and Seventies who saw in Mr. Fields an old school avuncular rebel who fought the forces of pretension and conformity to at least a draw.
http://dnoakes.multiply.com/journal/item/395/W.C_Fields_Part_One_
