Absurd!!!

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WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

W.C. Fields in The Bank Dick (1940)

W.C. Fields is literally my grandpa. I know you think I’m misusing the word “literally,” but I believe that Fields and the late Bill Woods occupied the same spirit. Here was a situation that played repeatedly between me and my grandpa:

Grandpa: Where the hell’s the paper?

Me: You’re sitting on.

Grandpa: Oh yeah… [trails off]… Well where the hell’s my coffee?

Me: Under the stairs, where you left it.

Grandpa: Oh yeah… [trails off]

Back in 2004, during my grandpa’s funeral, this was one of the standard humorous anecdotes I told anyone who gave me their condolences, so you can imagine my shock when a few months later, I saw the Fields short The Dentist (1932), which begins with almost the exact same passage of dialogue between Fields and his on-screen daughter. Like my grandpa - particularly in his drifting-slowly-into-Alzheimer’s period - the on-screen Fields was possessed with a cartoonishly shrewish wife; a blustery sense of self-aggrandizement; a fairly distant, spacey manner; a fondness for drink; a poor memory; long-winded stories that didn’t exactly go anywhere; a bemused, very dry sense of humour, as if he was always having a quiet, sly laugh at the world’s expense; a fondness for simple pleasures; and a healthy, almost charming degree of misanthropy.

See The Bank Dick - arguably Fields’ best feature - and you see my grandpa. Not only does Fields seem to share every one of the old man’ mannerisms, but the tangential, wildly undisciplined plot strikes me as the kind of script my senile grandpa would have written about himself. The plot: Egbert Sousé (“accent grave upon the e…”) is a boozehound and general malcontent who stumbles his way into taking credit for the apprehension of two bank robbers. Inexplicably, he is promoted as the head security guard for the bank. There is also a subplot in which he is recruited to direct a movie, but Fields (who wrote the screenplay under the pseudonym “Mahatma Kane Jeeves”) and director Edward F. Cline leave that one hanging unresolved.

Here’s what Roger Ebert writes in his “Great Movies” review:

Fields was paid $125,000 a picture in his later years, a good salary, and insisted on another $15,000 for his “screenplays,” which consisted of mental notes and scrawlings on the backs of envelopes. The synopsis of any of his films is hallucinatory. My source is his biographer, Robert Lewis Taylor, who writes that “My Little Chickadee” (1940) and “Never Give a Sucker an Even Break” (1941), two of his best-known films, “will probably stand up among the worst movies ever made,” but tellingly adds: “This scarcely detracts from their overall worth.”

You didn’t go for a good movie. You went for Fields, and for the surrealism of his plots. Consider “The Bank Dick,” which in he plays a man named Egbert Sousé (“accent grave upon the e”) — an unhappily married drunk who accidentally catches a thief, is rewarded with a job at the bank and falls in with a con man.

At one point he wanders into his favorite bar, the Black Pussy Cat (bartender: Shemp Howard), and meets a movie producer who hires him on the spot to fill in for A. Pismo Clam, the director of a movie being made in town. Fields arrives on the set, announces that the story will switch from an English drawing room drama to a circus picture, and begins to instruct the actors for a football scrimmage. The male lead is very tall, the female lead very short (“Is she standing in a hole?”) and after several funny minutes Fields simply walks off the set, and the directing job is never referred to again until a chase scene at the end of the film.

This kind of abrupt disconnect is common in Fields movies. Even a Marx Brothers plot was a masterpiece of construction by comparison. One sketch segues into another one, not seamlessly, and no effort is made at realism. (In his famous short “The Fatal Glass of Beer,” he repeatedly looks out a cabin door, intones “It’s not a fit night out for man nor beast,” and is hit in the face with what is obviously a handful of soap flakes hurled from just out of sight.)

Assimilating the unique fact of W.C. Fields is a lifelong occupation for any filmgoer, conducted from time to time according to no particular plan. There is not a single Fields film that “must” be seen in order to qualify as a literate movie lover, and yet if you are not eventually familiar with Fields you are not a movie lover at all. What is amazing about him is that he exists at all. He is not lovely, and although he is graceful it is a lugubrious grace, a kind of balance in a high psychic wind. All of his scenes depend, in one way or another, on sharing his private state: He is unloved, he detests life, he is hung over, he wants a drink, he is startled by sudden movements and loud noises, he has no patience for fools, everyone is a fool, and middle-class morality is a conspiracy against the man who wants to find surcease in alcoholic bliss. These are not the feelings of his characters; they are his own feelings.