Tuesday, August 28, 2007
The Jokes on Me Sam, Wrong Jug
Lately I have been working my way through the works of WC Fields. What a joyless, tedious endeavor. What’s so funny about a man putting on a hat? Or taking off his socks, getting pieces of paper stuck to his fingers, getting a parking ticket, trying to hit a golf ball - were audiences in the 1930s that desperate for entertainment? Did they have the minds of infants, or cats that could be distracted for hours at a time by a bit of light on the wall? And besides that, the stories themselves are depressing and drab: a henpecked husband, no moral exemplar himself - a layabout, a drunkard, an incompetent businessman, rude to his customers, dishonest to his employers (a grown man pulling the old “my mother in law is dead” gag to get off work!) - who after an hour or loafing about doing nothing is magically rewarded - that’s the plot of film after film! I have nothing against old comedy, indeed, can anything be funnier than a pie in the face, but there is no comedy here, just meanness and gags too “subtle” for anyone with even the smallest trace of a brain. And did I mention the violence of these films? Not redeemed by the absurdity of slapstick, it’s just violence as violence - kicking a woman when she’s down and complaining because her corsets hurt your great toe! It's shameful. I’ll never get these hours back, or the hours to come, as I force myself to watch the rest of the available Fields disks. This is almost as painful as the time I was forced to attend 5 consecutive Marx brothers films, in a theater no less! That gave me nightmares for years. I still can’t pass a mirror without weeping.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
You unsheathe your sarcasm, yet I completely sgree with everything you said here.
I despise WC Fields.
www.therecshow.com
I feel sad you dislike W.C. Fields so much. He is (and has been for decades) my favorite film comedian -- by a wide margin (except, perhaps for Harold Lloyd -- who I discovered much more recently ). I hope it's not my fault you were persuaded to check him out. ;~{
Humor (and receptivity to humor) is an unpredictable thing.
FWIW -- my kids all love Fields too.
Michael - yes, you bear some of the responsibility for this - you and Edward Copeland. And whoever keeps hacking into my netflix account to put Fields films at the top - 2 more came in the mail today! along with Itami's Family Game, a film I've dreaded seeing for years.
(You did click on the links in the post, right? There may be a certain lack of sincerity in some of the opinions expressed in this post....)
I did click on the links -- but they didn't help me a bit. ;~{
I am remarkably easy to fool -- except perhaps on April 1 (when I may be a bit more wary). (In partial defense -- I HAVE heard quite similar things said about Fields -- by people who actually have a semblance of cinematic taste -- in some matters).
I think Fields often shows a paradoxical sweetness that is missing in the Marx Bros (but which is a bit similar to that of Lloyd).
My (now college-age) twins re-enacted the mirror scene from Duck Soup after their first meeting with the film (when they were 7 or so).
I'll be interested in what you think about "Family Games" because this _is_ a film that _did_ disappoint me quite a bit (though it was still certainly well worth seeing).
Fields is subtle when he wants to be - one of the reasons I used him for this spoof: especially in his domestic miseries, he has that tone of understated irony ("it's hard to lose a mother-in-law" - "yes, very hard, almost impossible..."), downplaying his own troubles... the con man persona is usually a bit more brash, and obvious, though even there, it's all wrapped in irony, nothing he says quite what it seems to mean.... Still: he can build such elaborate gags out of so little, out of timing and grace.... I watched You're Telling Me over the weekend - which might be his masterpiece [I'm out of bizarro mode for good, now] - the golf routine is famous, but the opening routine, coming home drunk - is just as good, his ability to get so much out of carrying his hat, or finding a place to put his shoes, or avoiding the drapes... I ended up restarting the film 3 times.... "at the tone the time will be" - "8:30"... I'm going to try to write a longer review of it - it's got a lot going for it - like the way it combines the con man and loser personae Copeland wrote about - he does both in this film, more than in the other films I've seen....
I've found that watching him in bunches really pushes him up. I'd seen the Bank Dick, and liked it, but I like most 30s comedies, and it seemed just on the high side, but no more - but watching 5-6 films in the space of a couple weeks, he becomes utterly compelling.
Yes -- I agree his best work definitely has a cumulative impact (as long as one doesn't disrupt the momentum with "My Little Chickadee"). I am still saving up my re-watching of "You're Telling Me". But my traditional top favorites are "It's A Gift" and "Man on the Flying Trapeze", followed closely by "Bank Dick" and several other treasures.
Have you seen Lloyd's "Hot Water" -- which sets up a number of paradigms and motifs Fields would develop further (among them -- disastrous in-laws and disastrous car trips).
Post a Comment