“Do you think he drinks?”
“He didn’t get that nose from playing ping pong.”
Self-reflexive metanarratives have the capacity of dissecting celebrity and playing with personas. Such a context is ripe with possibility and so when we find ourselves on a studio lot with W.C. Fields eyeing the a big billboard for The Bank Dick, we know we just might be in for something. It came out the year prior, a critical darling and a commercial flop. He’s looking to pitch the follow-up to his producer.
He is under employment at Esoteric Pictures. His niece in the picture, real-life songstress Gloria Jean, plays a young ingenue out of the cut of Garland or Durbin. They are the film’s affable nucleus.
W.C. Fields is a picture of his usual self with his protruding proboscis and that straw hat of his as battered as ever. There’s the way he casually mumbles away at dialogue. It falls offhand and unrehearsed. You can almost lose it. Some of the garbled gook he gets out only makes it to your ears after he’s said it, and your mind has time enough to catch up.
Meanwhile, a typically huffy Franklin Pangborn with his stringy hair tries to command the unremittent chaos of the studio sets to get Gloria Jean to perfect her latest song, one of those high-pitched operatic numbers out of yesteryear. He’s already in a unstable mood when Fields pays him a call.
The script Fields is pitching becomes the premise for the movie itself as he darts in and out of scenes that might as well have no relation to one another aside from featuring Fields and Gloria Jean.
They start on an airplane together to some unknown destination. They might as well be waiting for Godot. He goes free-falling through space in pursuit of a bottle of spirits only to end up trampolining into the stratosphere of a pretty maiden from an oblivious world. Margaret Dumont is her imperious mother Mrs. Hemoglobin leading a great dane by the leash like some bleak Amazonian woman.
Fields, who penned the script under one of his many aliases, pushes the boundaries farther than he’s ever gone before, and it’s spectacular and surreal if this is what creative control looks like. It’s not as out and out funny as some other Fields movies, but it’s giving itself over in its totality to this absurd rhythm which is quite extraordinary to watch. He throws himself over a cliff in a basket only for Pangborn to loudly protest. The story lacks continuity! It’s an insult to human intelligence!
Is it too obvious to read it as a commentary on a career of movies and studios and such? I think not. Because W.C. Fields films were never the most tensely plotted, tightly constructed gems. He built his career out of ad-libs and performance, not so much the written word. Not that he didn’t come alive with verbal wit of his own accord and this was his gift.
But he was never made for the strictures of the industry, and so it’s fascinating to watch him when the restraints come flying off, and he’s got his run of the candy store so to speak. In fact, he rebels against conventional plot to the point of totally pulling it apart in front of us and tossing it away as collateral damage.
There is absolutely no pretense here. It’s even less about fast and free gags and bits being assembled together. It’s given itself over fully to surrealist feats of cinematic fancy. It might leave some befuddled now as it did then, but one can gather some sense of the performer. It suggest so much about him implicitly that still needs to be parsed through.
With the real-life context, it shows the decline of W.C. Fields who was quietly ditched for other more agreeable talent, especially because Never Give a Sucker… was hardly going to woo the audiences. Not in 1941. It was of that rarefied breed we often far too easily label “Ahead of its Time.” Here it seems pertinent.
The final set piece is an eye-popping death defying car chase to the maternity hospital. It feels like a flashback to the heyday of Keaton or Lloyd. It’s the most purely comedic slapdash moment in the picture, and does it fit with the rest of the movie? Not by a long shot, but somehow it remains a capstone for something that is totally of its own form and function. It’s almost obligatory. Here the career of W.C. Fields quietly came to an end. This was his final opus to hang his reputation on for future generations.
Doing a bit of perfunctory research, Fields was game to make another such picture with Gloria Jean and some of his favorite stock players. The studio wasn’t about to have it, and his own health was at the detriment of his drinking habit, lampooned as it might have been. W.C. Fields is one of the more irascible classic comedians to be able to pin down. But his comedy at its core does seem to get at a central human longing. It was always him against the world. He took it as well as dishing it out.
Maybe it’s only a small reward and too little too late, but I think even Fields understood the significance of Gloria Jean being in his corner unreservedly. Yes, it’s mawkish in the kind of Hollywood tripe sort of way, but secretly it also feels like a healing balm to the Fields character.
At last he can have some kind of peace. At last there is someone who will accept him unconditionally for who he is. My hope is that Fields experienced some of that in life as he did in his final major screen role. That’s not for me to know. All I know is that we all crave love; we all crave relief.
Fields wanted the film to be titled “The Great Man.” We can read it as jest or a bit of self-congratulatory pomp. But I think this is inside all of us veiled by insecurities. For people to see past our flaws. We want kids to look up to us and see us as what we aspire to be and not as the damaged goods we actually are. Gloria Jean extends her uncle such an honor as she smiles into the camera one last time. He is known and loved. To her he is a great man.
3.5/5 Stars
4 Star Films 