Final Fields

I just received The W. C. Fields Comedy Collection: Volume 2, the latest set of Fields films on DVD, so I popped Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941) in first, since it was the film in the collection that I was most familiar with, from showings on local TV in Chicago. It was both a revelation and a disappointment.

It was a revelation because the excellent quality of the image revealed the ravages that alcohol had written on Fields's face. No longer were lines like, "Follow me, tomato-puss," so funny. And Fields himself seemed drained, almost languorous. Sometimes that gave his ripostes an added layer of humor, like his answer to a large waitress's complaint to "don't be so free with your hands": "Listen, honey, I was only trying to guess your weight." But juggling moves were almost non-existent, and even his insouciant walk had seemed to slow from a saunter to a totter. The decline from his best film, the previous year's The Bank Dick, was precipitous.

The film itself has its moments, such as its best sequence, a flight on an airplane with an open deck at the back (!) that's part of a film-within-the-film that Fields (playing himself) is trying to pitch to Franklin J. Pangborn, playing the head of "Esoteric Studios." This is part of the glorious nonsensical mess that was Fields's original script (here attributed to a story by "Otis Criblecobis"). But the film also acquiesces in allowing Gloria Jean, a kind of cut-rate Deanna Durbin, plenty of screen time to warble tunes, much like Allan Jones or Tony Martin did in the MGM Marx Brothers pics. While the Marxes were hemmed in (and increasingly bored, and looking it) by Irving Thalberg's formula for them, Fields was able to produce one triumphant piece of subversive comedy--The Bank Dick--and then succumbed to studio pressures too. Why?

James Curtis's excellent biography of Fields tells part of the reason. One day, Cecil B DeMille's grandson (and the son of Anthony Quinn) wandered from DeMille's house to Fields's neighboring property and drowned in a shallow pool. Fields, the famous on-screen child-hater, was reportedly devastated. He no longer had the will to fight the studios and the Hayes Office (although in one scene, Fields confesses to the audience that the setting has been changed from a saloon to a ice-cream parlor because of the censor's objections). Booze and life itself had sapped Fields's energy, and he looks far older than his 61 years, although still capable of arousing laughter when he says, to a cleaning woman who is inadvertently pushing the head of a large, dark-haired pushbroom in Fields's face, "Get that Groucho Marx outta here!"