THOUGH many regarded him as the greatest comedian of pre-World War II Hollywood, W.C. Fields has slipped into undeserved semi-obscurity since enjoying cult popularity in the late 1960s.
The second volume of “The W.C. Fields Collection,” out this week from Universal, demonstrates how this Dickensian figure – who practically invented political incorrectness decades before it was called that – blended expert physical comedy with a unique vocal delivery of lines that Fields mostly wrote himself.
My favorite in the set is Clyde Bruckman’s uproarious “The Man on the Flying Trapeze” (1935), which like his classics “The Bank Dick” and “It’s a Gift” (both in the earlier set) and Earle C. Kenton’s hilarious “You’re Telling Me!” (included here) casts Fields as a henpecked suburban father.
Playing hooky from his job as an accountant for the first time in 25 years to attend a wrestling match, Fields’ Ambrose Wolfinger ends up with a string of traffic tickets, has a memorable encounter with a runaway tire – and finally gets a raise and the chance tell everyone off.
Fields also had a taste for surrealism, and he indulged it to the hilt in his last starring vehicle, Edward Cline’s “Never Give a Sucker an Even Break,” released five years before the tippling actor’s death on Christmas Day 1946. It was perhaps Fields’ most personal film.
The Great Man, as he was often called, plays himself – pitching the exasperated head of Esoteric Pictures (the prissy Franklin Pangborn) an outrageous script involving young singing star Gloria Jean, an airplane with a smoking platform, a Russian village and a mountaintop recluse played by longtime Marx Brothers foil Margaret Dumont. The closing car chase is justly famous.
William Beaudine’s “The Old Fashioned Way,” in which the child-hating comic tangles with frequent nemesis Baby LeRoy, is also in the set.
Also included is a 1965 TV documentary with excellent clips from several Fields films not yet on DVD – most notably the demolition-derby sequence from “If I Had a Million.”
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