by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After spending 2 ½ hours on The Great Gatsby I wanted a fundamentally different sort of film, and
I ended up showing The Old-Fashioned Way, the greatest movie William Beaudine ever directed and one of W. C.
Fields’ best comic vehicles. It’s set during the 1890’s and based on a story by
“Charles Bogle” (i.e., W. C. Fields), scripted by Garnett Weston and Jack
Cunningham, which casts Fields as The Great McGonigle, leader of a touring
theatrical company that plays such standards of the 1890’s repertoire as The
Drunkard and East Lynne. Indeed, scenes from The Drunkard appear in the film — the cast members playing in the
play-within-the-film get their own section in the credits — and Fields does the
villain’s role to perfection. He also gets a spectacular juggling scene in
which he immortalizes the famous cigar-box trick, which he invented shortly
after he ran away from home in his teens to become a traveling entertainer
because he couldn’t afford professional juggling equipment and so he had to go
D.I.Y. The cigar-box routine Fields invented became incredibly popular — Charlie
Parker remembered seeing Black vaudevillians on the TOBA (Theatre Owners’
Booking Association, though nicknamed by its performers “Tough on Black Asses”)
circuit perform it in his childhood, and in the 1970’s I saw a live juggler
reproduce it on stage and give Fields the credit (and he probably learned it
from watching this movie!) — and it’s a real blessing we have it captured on
film.
The Old-Fashioned Way, like
most of Fields’ films, is more a succession of great scenes than a unified
plot, but the gags are hilarious and come right after each other in a way we
hardly get in today’s so-called “comedies.” From the opening — in which Fields
sets fire to the summons a county sheriff is about to serve him, uses it to
light his cigar and thanks the man for providing a light — throughout the film,
Fields is in lovable-rogue mode, stealing a sleeper-car ticket from a fellow
train passenger and getting indignant when his ownership of the ticket is
challenged (and literally
stepping into the copious nightgown of the passenger in the berth below him,
played by an uncredited Billy Gilbert); talking wealthy widow Cleopatra
Pepperday (the marvelous Jan Duggan) from the town of Bellefountaine into
paying off his debts by promising her one line in the play (which she rehearses
— “Here comes the prince!” — incessantly in a gag Fields and his writers might
have borrowed from Winnie Lightner’s role in Gold Diggers on Broadway) and then stiffing her; and Fields’ by-play with the
infamous Baby LeRoy as Pepperday’s son. Baby LeRoy throws food at Fields over
the Pepperday dinner table every chance he gets, and when Cleopatra says she
can’t understand why he’s behaving that way around McGonigle — “You really
should see him when he’s by himself!” — Fields mutters under his breath as only
he could mutter, “I’d like to catch
him when he’s by himself.”
There’s a hair’s-breath of a plot to this movie: it
has to do with Fields’ daughter, Betty McGonigle (Judith Allen, who has some of
the marvelous tremulous quality of Barbara Stanwyck and on the strength of her
performance here should have had more of a career than she got), who’s part of
dad’s troupe and who also has attracted the attentions of Wally Livingston (Joe
Morrison, who had the misfortune of being a quite good Irish tenor just when
the bottom was dropping out of the market for Irish tenors). Wally is the son
of a rich manufacturer (Oscar Apfel) who wants him to abandon his dreams of the
theatre and go to college — and Betty actually feels the same way, but Wally is
determined that he won’t leave the theatre unless Betty agrees to marry him and
dad blesses the union. (Fields was obviously thinking of the incredible
disrepute actors were held in during the 1890’s, something he’d experienced
personally. He was fond of telling a joke from the period in which a young man
runs away from home and, years later, comes back to his parents with his tail
between his legs. They ask him what he’s been doing while he’s been away, and
after a lot of hemming and hawing he tearfully confesses, “I’ve been … an actor!” His parents say, “An actor! And to think we thought you’d become a nice,
respectable burglar!”) Fields
completes his troupe’s run in Bellefountaine but then receives a telegram that
ticket sales are so poor the rest of his tour has been canceled, and in a scene
that shows that Fields — as much as he loathed Chaplin in general and Chaplin’s
celebrated pathos in particular — could be a quite good actor and do pathos of
his own, he puts on a good face and tells his daughter he’s got a New York
offer that doesn’t include her, so she should marry the nice young man, get him
to go to college and settle down with him. In a memorable final scene, we see
what he’s really doing for a
living: hawking a patent medicine supposedly invented by the Yack Wee Indian
tribe, pushing it as a cure for hoarseness and faking hoarseness himself so he
can drink some of the stuff, then boom out at fortissimo volume, “IT CURES HOARSENESS!”
