The Man With the Recalcitrant Hat

Million Dollar Legs (Edward F. Cline, 1932)

Susan Fleming, Jack Oakie, and W.C. Fields in Million Dollar Legs

Migg Tweeny: Jack Oakie
The President: W.C. Fields
The Major-Domo: Andy Clyde
Mata Machree: Lyda Roberti
Angela: Susan Fleming
Mysterious Man: Ben Turpin
Secretary of the Treasury: Hugh Herbert
Mr. Baldwin: George Barbier
Willie: Dickie Moore

Director: Edward F. Cline
Screenplay: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Henry Myers
Cinematography: Arthur L. Todd

Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (Edward F. Cline, 1941)

W.C. Fields and Margaret Dumont in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break 

The Great Man: W.C. Fields
Gloria: Gloria Jean
The Producer: Franklin Pangborn
Mrs. Hemogloben: Margaret Dumont
Ouilotta Hemogloben: Susan Miller
The Rival: Leon Errol
The Waitress: Jody Gilbert
The Soda Jerk: Irving Bacon
The Producer's Wife: Mona Barrie
Butch: Billy Lenhart
Buddy: Kenneth Brown
The Cleaning Lady: Minerva Urecal

Director: Edward F. Cline
Screenplay: John T. Neville, Prescott Chaplin, W.C. Fields (as Otis Criblecoblis)
Cinematography: Charles Van Enger
Art direction: Jack Otterson
Film editing: Arthur Hilton
Music: Frank Skinner, Charles Previn

Was ever man so troubled by his hats? Million Dollar Legs and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break bracket W.C. Fields's career as a movie star (discounting his appearances in short subjects and in supporting roles in silent films and early talkies), and both begin with him struggling to manage a hat. It's a top hat in the earlier film, and it insists on having its own way, culminating in a familiar Fieldsian bit in which it rides behind him on the tip of his walking stick. In the later film, it's a straw boater whose lid comes to grief. Fields had crafted these hat tricks in vaudeville, and they remain one of the most endearing aspects of a potentially unlovable personality. Fields always managed to triumph over his own persona: Although Sucker finds him repellent in aspect, the broken veins of his nose and face unconcealable by any makeup artist, you can't help understanding why Gloria Jean, in an odd curtain line, proclaims her love for him. Both films are the apotheoses of the kind of sublime lunacy that emerged from his imagination, the former a surreal take on the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic Games, the latter an assault on the movie studios that tried (and usually failed) to stifle that imagination. Although Fields was surrounded in both films with superb comic talent -- Jack Oakie, Andy Clyde, Ben Turpin, Hugh Herbert, Franklin Pangborn, Margaret Dumont, Leon Errol -- they are dominated by him, braving it out through all reversals of fortune that may come his way. The greatest film comedians -- Buster Keaton, Charles Chaplin, the Marxes -- were similarly indomitable. The climax of Sucker is a spectacular car and firetruck chase that owes more to the direction of Edward F. Cline, veteran of the golden age of silent slapstick comedy, than to Fields, but we shall never see his like again.

The Bank Dick (Edward F. Cline, 1940)

This is what I watched on election night once it became apparent that the votes might take the depressing direction they eventually did. Better a lovable con man like W.C. Fields than a real-life flamboyant fraud, thought I. Fields is Egbert Sousé (the accent is aigu, not grave, as he insists), ne'er-do-well paterfamilias of a dysfunctional household, who escapes from his nagging wife (Cora Witherspoon) and mother-in-law (Jessie Ralph) and his horrid daughters Myrtle (Una Merkel) and Elsie Mae (Evelyn Del Rio) to the corner saloon as well as a brief stint as a movie director that somehow leads to his employment as a detective in the local bank. (Honestly, never try to summarize the plot of one of Fields's movies.) It's all inspired, slightly surreal nonsense, adorned by characters with names like Og Oggilby (Grady Sutton), J. Pinkerton Snoopington (Franklin Pangborn), and A. Pismo Clam (Jack Norton). All I can say is that it made me laugh when I felt like crying. 

David Copperfield (George Cukor, 1935)

As long as there are novels and movies, there will be people trying to turn novels into movies. Which is a task usually doomed to some degree of failure, given that the two art forms have significantly different aims and techniques. Novels are interior: They reveal what people think and feel. Movies are exterior: Thoughts and feelings have to be depicted, not reported. Novels breed reflection; movies breed reaction. Novel-based movies usually succeed only when the genius of the filmmakers exceeds that of the novelist, as in the case, for example, of Alfred Hitchcock's transformation (1960) of Robert Bloch's Psycho, or Francis Ford Coppola's extrapolation (1972) from Mario Puzo's The Godfather. We mostly settle for, at best, a satisfying skim along the surface of the novel, which is what we get in Cukor's version of Dickens's novel. I'm not claiming, of course, that Cukor or the film's producer, David O. Selznick, was a greater genius than Dickens, but together -- and with the help of Hugh Walpole, who adapted the book, and Howard Estabrook, the credited screenwriter -- they produced something of a parallel masterpiece. They did so by sticking to the visuals of the novel, not just Dickens's descriptions but also the illustrations for the original edition by "Phiz," Hablot Knight Brown. The result is that it's hard to read the novel today without seeing and hearing W.C. Fields as Micawber, Edna May Oliver as Betsey Trotwood, or Roland Young as Uriah Heep. The weaknesses of the film are also the weaknesses of the book: women like David's mother (Elizabeth Allan) and Agnes Wickfield (Madge Evans) are pallid and angelic, and David himself becomes less interesting as he grows older, or in terms of the movie, as he ceases to be the engaging Freddie Bartholomew and becomes instead the vapid Frank Lawton. But as compensation we have the full employment of MGM's set design and costume departments, along with a tremendous storm at sea -- the special effects are credited to Slavko Vorkapich.