by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Poppy,
W. C. Fields’ next-to-last movie for Paramount, made in 1936 when age,
alcoholism and injury (he was apparently in back pain through much of the shoot
and virtually all the long shots featured a double — Robert Lewis Taylor’s 1949
biography of Fields said it was his stand-in, Bill Oberlin, but imdb.com lists
John Sinclair as his double) were all catching up to him and making it harder
for him to work. Indeed, even though he was still popular, he was getting so
difficult to work with that Paramount dropped him after one more movie (his
overbearing performance in The Big Broadcast of 1938) and Universal picked him up. One odd thing about
Fields’ films is that, though still shot on a budget and with relatively short
running times (Poppy runs just 71
minutes), his Paramount films have excellent production values — far better
than the Universals, which are screamingly funny (especially the last two, The
Bank Dick and Never Give a Sucker
an Even Break — a title cribbed from the
final line of Poppy) but
wretchedly photographed with nary a hint of atmosphere. (Universal was capable
of great atmospherics but seemed to reserve them for their horror films and,
starting in the mid-1940’s, their noirs.)
Poppy began life as a
Broadway musical in 1923 that for the first time gave W. C. Fields the chance
to play an actual character instead of just doing comic sketches and juggling
routines in a revue. He’s “Professor” Eustace McGargle (a classic Fields
moniker), a traveling carnie who worms his way into small-town festivals and is
devoted to his young daughter Poppy (Rochelle Hudson), whom he’s raised as a
single parent and cared for as best he can given the economically marginal
existence they’ve been sharing. In the film’s opening scene — it’s set in 1883
and set designers Hans Drier and Bernard Herzbrun create a beautiful pastoral
atmosphere on extensive and elaborate “exteriors” built inside Paramount’s
soundstages, while director A. Edward Sutherland and cinematographer William C.
Mellor (a considerably more prestigious cameraman than usually shot a Fields
movie) give the show a rich, dappled visual look that suffuses the film in a
nostalgic, autumnal glow — Eustace and Poppy are on a roadside and she’s
lamenting the fact that she’s hungry. “We’re like Robin Hood,” he tells her.
“We steal from the rich and give to the poor?” “Which poor?” she asks. “Us
poor,” he replies. He gets his chance when they stumble into a small town where
a carnival is taking place; he starts working as a barker even though the town’s
mayor (Granville Bates) — the event is being sponsored directly by the city —
has no idea who he is. McGargle fakes an injury and demands a settlement of
$10,000 and a carnival booth; he gets the booth and $10 (though he doesn’t seem
to get the money because in the next scene he and Poppy are shown mooching two
hot dogs from a carnival vendor and, when the man demands immediate payment,
giving him back what’s left of them; “What am I going to do with these?” the
vendor asks, and Fields answers, “First you insult me, then you ask for my
advice on salesmanship!”), and even before he arrives at the carnival he’s made
$20 by selling a bartender a talking dog (McGargle is a ventriloquist), then
having the dog say that because he’s so insulted at being sold for so little,
“I’ll never say another word again!” (“He probably means it, too,” Fields
mutters in his own voice in an aside as he leaves.)
Poppy is so disjointed a movie (Fields almost never made a
movie that wasn’t disjointed)
that it’s only halfway through the film that we get to the main story: it seems
that the largest house in the town is occupied by the Contessa de Puizzi
(Catherine Doucet), who’s really an ex-showgirl named Maggie Tubbs who either
genuinely got married briefly to a European count or just faked having done so
(the script writers Waldemar Young and Virginia Van Upp — also more prestigious
names than we usually see on the credits of a Fields film — never quite
explained which). When McGargle is introduced to her he says, “Ah, the Countess
de Pussy, eh?” — a line whose cheeky audacity is amazing, especially in a
“post-Code” film — and there’s a great scene on her croquet lawn in which
McGargle pretends to be the world’s greatest croquet player but hasn’t a clue
about the game. (The funniest bit is his line, “Who left all these wires all
over the lawn?”) But she’s not the rightful owner; it really belongs to
Elizabeth Putnam, who ran away from town to join a circus two decades earlier,
and this gives McGargle an idea: he’ll fake a marriage certificate between
himself and Elizabeth Putnam, claim that Putnam is dead but Poppy is her
daughter and therefore the rightful heir. Only the local attorney, Whiffen (the
marvelous light comedian Lynne Overman, who got stuck in character roles while
two of his friends from his days on Broadway, James Cagney and Spencer Tracy,
became major stars), catches him at it and demands to be included in the deal —
then double-crosses him. In exchange for de Puizzi’s agreement to marry him
(though why he would want to marry
her is a mystery), he exposes the McGargles as frauds — only Sarah Tucker (the
great Maude Eburne from Ladies They Talk About), the only local who’s sympathetic to the McGargles,
discovers a locket among Poppy’s possessions that proves she is Elizabeth Putnam’s daughter after all, so Poppy gets
her fortune, the stability of small-town life she’s yearned for after all those
years on the road with her dad (who tearfully admits he’s not her dad at all;
he took her in when she was 3 after her mom died), and the rather dubious
affections of Mayor Farnsworth’s son Bill (Richard Cromwell, who’s tall, gawky
and comes off as Paramount’s attempt to clone their own Robert Montgomery).
Fields had filmed Poppy a decade
earlier as a Paramount silent called Sally of the Sawdust, with D. W. Griffith (of all people!) as his
director, Griffith’s wife Carol Dempster as the female lead (she’s considerably
better than the film historians would have us believe) and Alfred Lunt (again,
of all people!) as the local boy she falls for — and Lunt in the role was so
wretchedly miscast he’s just as gawky and awkward as Cromwell. The silent
version was actually longer and contained an elaborate chase scene at the end,
though Poppy has one marvelous
moment in which Fields (actually Sinclair — the doubling is especially obvious,
and though we hear Fields’ voice the camera is so far away it’s clear either
post-dubbed the lines or pre-recorded them “wild”) leaps onto a high-wheel
bicycle in an attempt to escape after having been exposed. I suspect Dorothy
Donnelly’s original script for the stage version was longer than either movie
and explained the plot points better, and I also wish they had kept at least
some of the original songs; instead all we get in the way of music is an
opening choral number by Frederick Hollander (Marlene Dietrich’s favorite
songwriter) and Sam Coslow extolling Poppy’s charms, and her big feature at the
carnival, “A Rendezvous with a Dream,” credited to Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin
but strongly reminiscent of the barbershop-quartet classic “On Moonlight Bay.”
Fields is marvelous (even with all the doubling, which is pretty obvious every
time the character has to take a pratfall); Rochelle Hudson is winsome (though
I suspect her voice was doubled and Mary Brian, the juvenile heroine from
Fields’ immediately previous film The Man on the Flying Trapeze, probably would have played it better), and the film
filled with juicy supporting roles played by fine character actors like Overman
and Jerry Bergen (as a gardener whom Fields repeatedly cheats out of money
using the same stratagems Bud Abbott later pulled on Lou Costello in film after
film after film). Fields made funnier films in his career both before and after
this one, but Poppy is a lovely
nostalgic pastoral that’s warm, amusing and a welcome entry in the Fields canon
— even though one suspects Donnelly’s original musical had a potentially better
film in it than either of the
ones that got made.
