W.C. Field's Comedy Shorts.
The Pharmacist / That Fatal Glass of Beer/ The Barber Shop (all 1933)/ The Golf Specialist(1930) and The Pool Shark. (1915.) Available to stream as part of the Cohen Film Collection on Curzon Home Cinema. 93 mins.
Somewhere down the line W.C. Fields went the way of Eddie Waring and Frank Spencer; figures that were an impressionist's staple when I were a boy but have now almost disappeared from the public communal memory. Fields, or representations and caricatures of Fields, were ubiquitous fifty years ago and he was as iconic as Chaplin, Groucho or Laurel and Hardy, but now I doubt more than a handful of people would recognise a WC living statue in Covent Garden.
The really striking thing is that although he is a figure I've been aware of all my life, I'm also totally ignorant of his work. (Apart from Never Give A Sucker An Even Break, I can't say with any certainty that I've seen any of his films.) Even in the 70s, it was rare to actually see his films on TV. The obvious conclusion is that perhaps his stuff hasn't aged well.
To squash that notion the Cohen Film Collection has restored some of his shorts and stuck them into a single feature-length compilation. Four of them are works from the early days of sound while The Pool Shark is his first silent appearance. And for about five minutes it is a little disorientating: it's difficult to make out what people are saying or work out the rhythm of it. But once you adjust and get into the swing of it, you realise that he was a real comic master and so much more than the bulbous nosed curmudgeon and I-like-children-but-couldn't-eat-a-whole-one of reputation.
The W.C Fields character is surprisingly flexible, going from brusque and overbearing to cowed and humbled. As a comedian he was the whole package: he is a witty raconteur but years on the stage meant he was a superb physical comic. He was deadpan and droll but occasionally he'll bristle with anarchic slapstick energy and at times his comedy is outrageous. In The Pharmacist, there's a moment where his daughter eats a pet canary from out of the cage because she's hungry. This after she'd help prepare his midday Martini by attaching the shaker to her pogo stick.
The Pharmacist, which starts the package, is the most aggressively off-the-wall of the five films and it veers off all over the place, initially disconcertingly and then thrillingly – it might have been better saved for later. The Golf Specialist is the earliest sound piece here, a film record of a famous stage sketch, Fields trying to impress a lady by teaching her how to play. It's the most straightforward piece of slapstick here given a weird edge by the man playing his caddy (Allen Wood) looking so pale, vacant and sweat-drenched that he looks like he's trying to hold back a bout of the DTs.
They are all great but the pick is surely The Fatal Glass of Beer, in which Fields plays a Yukon prospector who is constantly walking in and out of his shack announcing "And it ain't a fit night out for man nor beast," right before a handful of fake snow is thrown in his face. It's a parody of a kind of melodrama that surely nobody has seen since WWII, but it's so perfect you get it exactly.
The CFC restoration looks very good but sometimes you wish something could have been done about the dialogue, a lot of which gets lost. Fields was rarely the clearest of orators but as most of these were made when sound was still a bold innovation you really notice when the performers aren't standing near enough to the microphones.
Overall though this is wonderful stuff. Time for a W.C. revival, please.
The Pharmacist / That Fatal Glass of Beer/ The Barber Shop (all 1933)/ The Golf Specialist(1930) and The Pool Shark. (1915.) Available to stream as part of the Cohen Film Collection on Curzon Home Cinema. 93 mins.
Somewhere down the line W.C. Fields went the way of Eddie Waring and Frank Spencer; figures that were an impressionist's staple when I were a boy but have now almost disappeared from the public communal memory. Fields, or representations and caricatures of Fields, were ubiquitous fifty years ago and he was as iconic as Chaplin, Groucho or Laurel and Hardy, but now I doubt more than a handful of people would recognise a WC living statue in Covent Garden.
The really striking thing is that although he is a figure I've been aware of all my life, I'm also totally ignorant of his work. (Apart from Never Give A Sucker An Even Break, I can't say with any certainty that I've seen any of his films.) Even in the 70s, it was rare to actually see his films on TV. The obvious conclusion is that perhaps his stuff hasn't aged well.
To squash that notion the Cohen Film Collection has restored some of his shorts and stuck them into a single feature-length compilation. Four of them are works from the early days of sound while The Pool Shark is his first silent appearance. And for about five minutes it is a little disorientating: it's difficult to make out what people are saying or work out the rhythm of it. But once you adjust and get into the swing of it, you realise that he was a real comic master and so much more than the bulbous nosed curmudgeon and I-like-children-but-couldn't-eat-a-whole-one of reputation.
The W.C Fields character is surprisingly flexible, going from brusque and overbearing to cowed and humbled. As a comedian he was the whole package: he is a witty raconteur but years on the stage meant he was a superb physical comic. He was deadpan and droll but occasionally he'll bristle with anarchic slapstick energy and at times his comedy is outrageous. In The Pharmacist, there's a moment where his daughter eats a pet canary from out of the cage because she's hungry. This after she'd help prepare his midday Martini by attaching the shaker to her pogo stick.
The Pharmacist, which starts the package, is the most aggressively off-the-wall of the five films and it veers off all over the place, initially disconcertingly and then thrillingly – it might have been better saved for later. The Golf Specialist is the earliest sound piece here, a film record of a famous stage sketch, Fields trying to impress a lady by teaching her how to play. It's the most straightforward piece of slapstick here given a weird edge by the man playing his caddy (Allen Wood) looking so pale, vacant and sweat-drenched that he looks like he's trying to hold back a bout of the DTs.
They are all great but the pick is surely The Fatal Glass of Beer, in which Fields plays a Yukon prospector who is constantly walking in and out of his shack announcing "And it ain't a fit night out for man nor beast," right before a handful of fake snow is thrown in his face. It's a parody of a kind of melodrama that surely nobody has seen since WWII, but it's so perfect you get it exactly.
The CFC restoration looks very good but sometimes you wish something could have been done about the dialogue, a lot of which gets lost. Fields was rarely the clearest of orators but as most of these were made when sound was still a bold innovation you really notice when the performers aren't standing near enough to the microphones.
Overall though this is wonderful stuff. Time for a W.C. revival, please.
