W.C. Fields

W.C. Fields

(c) Copyright (2015) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved

W.C. Fields allegedly asked for this etching on his tombstone:  “On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.”  This faintest of compliments to his and my birth city half-hides Fields’s distaste for bad memories.  Fueled by his unyielding sadness, his immortal film comedies often depict harassed men stumbling out of chaos into improbable victory.

By running away from Philadelphia, his birthplace in 1879, young Fields escaped the father who beat him mercilessly. Eventually, he supported himself as a tramp juggler. After a career in vaudeville and stardom in the Ziegfeld Follies, Fields became a fixture in silent films and then survived the industry’s adoption of “the talkies.”

Like his colleagues in anarchy, the Marx Brothers, Fields achieved his peak in the Thirties and then replicated his craziness more tamely in the Forties.  In "It's a Gift" (1934), Fields plays a beleaguered husband and father seeking financial salvation in a California orange grove. While always amusing, his rather bitter, dark humor depicts the unlikely victory of the bullied. Fields also achieves the miracle in "David Copperfield" (1934) of being recognizably in character as Fields and, at the same time, being gloriously right as Dickens’s perpetually financially distressed Wilkins Micawber.

Fields’s later films reworked the same themes in different settings. In "The Bank Dick" (1940), he plays the soused Egbert Sousé, who insists that there is an "accent grave over the e." Periodically ejaculating "Godfrey Daniels!" and "Mother of Pearl!"  Sousé wanders between the ferocious females in his home and his friendly bartender at his haven, the Black Pussy Café. Fields also wrote the anarchic screenplay, credited to "Mahatma Kane Jeeves."

For the scenario for "Never Give a Sucker an Even Break" (1941) that Fields wrote on the back of an envelope, Universal paid him $25,000. It's a wild film--Fields just piles on every nutty thing that occurs to him--and it's a lot of fun. But there is no mistaking how much younger and healthier he looks in 1935 than in 1941, and he died soon after, in 1946.  The dying Fields supposedly read a Bible and explained that “I’m looking for loopholes.”

His gift amazes me. For all of these films, as well as the comedic western in which Fields wooed Mae West as "My Little Chickadee" (1940), for the many Fieldsian one-liners like “I must have a drink of breakfast,” for the innumerable pseudonyms under which he wrote screenplays and opened hundreds of bank accounts—Primrose Magoo, Otis Criblecoblis—I cannot give thanks enough. I just wish he hadn’t been from Philadelphia. 

first published in The Woodstock Independent