W.C. Fields, Post-Modernist
By 1941, following a string of hits that would be considered iconic in the years to come (My Little Chickadee, The Bank Dick), W.C. Fields’ drinking began to take a serious toll both on his health and his ability to perform. It was becoming clear he might not be able to carry a film for much longer. He did, however, have one film left in him, and it would turn out to be not only his strangest picture, but also one that was—if accidentally—years ahead of its time.
Never GIve a Sucker an Even Break—the title taken from one of Fields’ three golden rules—was directed by Edward Klein, the former vaudevillian who’d also directed Fields’ two previous films, neither of which gave any hint that something like this was coming. Sucker is self-reflexive, intercontextual, cross-referential, and at times confounding—in short, it’s a postmodernist film made nearly two decades before French intellectuals coined the term. Across its 71 minutes, in fact, he deconstructs the very idea of a W.C. Fields film. (Coincidentally, it was released two months prior to the equally postmodern film version of Hellzapoppin’.)
It only makes sense that in his last starring role Fields should play himself (though in the credits he’s referred to as “The Great Man”), considering he’d essentially been playing himself all along. Within the story, he weaves a fictional life around himself, populated by actors who sometimes play themselves, and sometimes don’t. His co-star singer Gloria Jean, for instance, plays herself, but as his niece (she wasn’t his niece, and Anne Nagel, who wasn’t his sister, plays his sister.. He also takes a number of swipes at his contemporaries (“You wanna grow up and be dumb like Zasu Pitts?”), while simultaneously mocking himself.
As the film opens, Fields is standing on a Hollywood sidewalk in front of a billboard advertising his previous film, The Bank Dick. As he waits, both he and the film are heckled by children and passing motorists. A woman punches him for looking at her, and he gives the brush to an acquaintance who asks for a role in his new picture. He enters a diner and is harassed by the waitress, then goes to a story meeting with a producer at Esoteric Studios only to have the secretary insult him—or so he believes. Although one of the most powerful figures in the business at the time, he paints a self-portrait of someone who gets no respect, and sadly on account of his reputation that was becoming the case.
Meanwhile Gloria Jean is attempting to rehearse a song for a new role “Uncle Bill” had arranged for her. While most cinematic musical numbers take place in an alternate universe free of interruptions and extraneous noise, Gloria Jean is attempting to sing a song while workmen are constructing a set around her. (It’s a gag Ernie Kovacs would borrow and push even further some 15 years later.)
Back at Esoteric, Fields finally gets in to see the producer (comic actor Franklin Pangborn), and together they start reading Fields’ new script.
Without much of a fade, or dissolve, or voiceover of any kind we jump to the film on the page, which quickly reveals itself to be not only very bad, but completely absurd. Fields and Gloria Jean are taking a flight somewhere when Fields falls off the obsevation deck at the back of the plane and lands safely in a small mountaintop village populated only by an overprotective but naive mother (Margaret Dumont of the Marx Brothers pictures) and her beautiful but sheltered daughter (Susan Miller in one of her few credited roles. She would also appear in Hellzapoppin’ later that year).
We soon begin cutting seamlessly back and forth between the office of an increasingly irate producer and an increasingly insane film.
After the producer storms out in a rage, Fields leaves, goes to an ice cream parlor, and turns to the camera, breaking the fourth wall for the first time: “This scene was supposed to be in a saloon, but the censors cut it out.”
Fields then gets involved in a reckless high speed car chase as he rushes a woman he mistakenly believes to be in labor to the maternity ward. The film ends abruptly and with no real resolution after he crashes his car through the hospital wall, undoubtedly leaving any number of audience members scratching their heads. Of course it’s hard to have a resolution when you’ve had no plot. The story, as it is, merely wanders about drunkenly from scene to scene for a little over an hour.
There are any number of parallels between Sucker and Hellzapoppin’ (which of course was a hugely popular stage play long before it was a film, and one Fields was likely familiar with). Both are self-referential, both involve a film within a film, both break the fourth wall and make references to other films and the film business itself,and both are absurd. Hellzapoppin’ is much louder and frenetically paced while Fields, as ever, moves at a leisurely, inebriated shamble through his film from gag to unconnected gag. Although both may have been aiming for a similarly unique pre-postmodernist aesthetic for the times, the major difference between the two films (apart from the pace) is that ultimately Hellzapoppin’ makes one major concession to convention by actually maintaining a storyline.
It’s very sad, for me anyway, that this would essentially mark the end for someone as brilliant and well-read as Fields. From this point until his death his health prevented him from doing anything more than a couple of brief cameos in war effort pictures. I only wish he’d had the chance to make Never Wise Up a Chump—given the evidence of Sucker, there’s no telling what he might have done with it.
by Jim Knipfel