by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched one of the movies
TCM was showing in last night’s tribute to W. C. Fields, his 1939 film You
Can’t Cheat an Honest Man. Fields
had made most of his movies for Paramount — he’d been under contract to them
from 1926 to 1928 and again from 1932 to 1937 — but his growing alcoholism and
periods of ill health (in many of his later films his stand-in, Bill Oberlin,
filled in for him whenever he had to do a pratfall) led Paramount to drop him
after his featured role in The Big Broadcast of 1938. Universal signed him and decided that for their
first film with Fields they would team him on-screen with ventriloquist Edgar
Bergen and his famous dummies, Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd, who had
just scored big with their guest appearance in the 1938 film The Goldwyn
Follies. Fields had been a frequent
guest on Bergen’s radio show, where he traded insults with the dummies (one famous
exchange: Fields said, “Quiet, wormwood, or I’ll whittle you down to a coat
hanger,” while “McCarthy” fired back, “I’ll stick a wick in your nose and use
you for an alcohol lamp”), and though TCM presented Fields’ granddaughter, Dr.
Harriet Fields, to introduce the film and say that Fields and Bergen admired
each other and got along genuinely well during its making, that was quite the
opposite of everything I’d heard about this film before. In W. C. Fields by
Himself, a 1970’s compilation of
letters, memos, interviews, notes, unused stories and screenplays and whatnot
by Fields compiled by his grandson, Ronald J. Fields, Fields himself described
the making of You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man as a hellish experience. First, even though Fields
himself wrote the story (under his usual writing pseudonym “Charles Bogle”),
the actual script was taken from him and assigned to other hands — credited
screenwriters George Marion, Jr., Richard Mack and Everett Freeman, as well as
Lew Lipton, Henry Johnson, Manuel Seff and James Seymour, four other people
imdb.com claims were uncredited “contributor[s] to screen play construction and
special sequences” — and Fields complained that the additional writers had
screwed up his character, circus owner, barker and showman Larson E. Whipsnade,
and made him too relentlessly unsympathetic.
Fields was especially upset at
producer Lester Cowan for having forced him to delete a key character: Madame
Gorgeous, a tightrope walker who was married to Whipsnade and was also the star
attraction of his Circus Giganticus. At the beginning of the film Madame
Gorgeous was supposed to take a tumble off the high wire and die, thereby
plunging Whipsnade into bitter grief and his circus from relative prosperity to
down-at-the-heels penury, but Cowan and the other “suits” at Universal decided
a fatal circus act was no way to start a comedy and demanded that the scene
come out. (There are two shots of one of the wagons in Whipsnade’s circus
painted with an ad for “Madame Gorgeous” on the sides, but that’s the only
trace we get of her.) Then, at least according to Fields’ grandson (disagreeing
big-time with his granddaughter), Fields and Bergen hated each other as much
off-screen as they did on. Also, Universal assigned director George Marshall to
the film, and while Marshall was a talented comic director, the sort of
comedian he was used to working with was Bob Hope and he and Fields were so
mutually incompatible that Fields brought in his own director, former Keystone
Kop Edward F. Cline, to direct his scenes. Finally, when the initial previews
of You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man were disappointing, Universal called Fields back for retakes, which really pissed him off because it cost him a role he’d
been very proud of and one he had longed to play: the title character in MGM’s
classic 1939 adaptation of The Wizard of Oz. One imdb.com “Trivia” poster said Fields had
turned down Wizard to make You Can’t Cheat
an Honest Man, but that couldn’t be
further from the truth; he had hoped to finish this film in time to do Wizard, but Universal’s demand for retakes cost him the
big role at MGM and for the remaining seven years of his life Fields was bitter
about it. Not knowing this history, and not having seen much of Fields’ other
work, when I first saw You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man I found it utterly enthralling and quite funny,
though today it seems amusing and very much in the Fields canon but lacking the
“heart” of Fields’ previous excursions in the “carnie” realm, The
Old-Fashioned Way and Poppy.
The plot, in case it matters, casts Fields as an
unscrupulous circus owner determined to extract every last dime from his paying
patrons and share as little of it as possible with his employees, including his
attractions. About his only normal human emotions are directed towards his two
kids, son Phineas (John Arledge, who plays a surprisingly small role in the
film) and daughter Victoria (Constance Moore). Victoria is away at college and
is being cruised by the upper-class twit Roger Bel-Goodie (James Bush), whose
family’s money has got him out of scrapes with other women and DUI arrests. The
moment we get our first close-up of him and see his “roo” moustache we know he’s up to no good and totally wrong for Our
Heroine, but Victoria determines to marry him anyway, because even though she
doesn’t love him, he’s got enough money to bail her dad’s circus out of the
$3,500 Whipsnade owes and for which various sheriffs and deputies are chasing
him. Only Victoria instead attracts the amorous attentions of the circus’s
ventriloquist, Edgar Bergen (playing himself), and in the end — after a good
and very Marxian scene in which Whipsnade alienates Bel-Goodie’s equally
stuck-up parents (Thurston Hall — who else? — and Mary Forbes) at a fancy party by telling a long anecdote
about snakes (it’s established that Mrs. Bel-Goodie is so scared of snakes she
immediately faints upon hearing the words “snake” or any name of a snake
species), and in the end Victoria ends up with Bergen, Whipsnade ends up
heaven-knows-where (there isn’t a final pathos-ridden leave-taking between
father and daughter, as there were in The Old-Fashioned Way and Poppy) and Bergen’s other dummy, Mortimer Snerd, ends up in a runaway balloon (don’t ask). It’s a
good movie but one that could have been considerably better; it’s watchable and
funny (Fields couldn’t have made an unfunny movie if he’d tried), and it’s a good warmup for later Fields
films at Universal, including the relentless comic assault of The Bank Dick and the metafictional Never Give a Sucker an
Even Break (though he tried to get the
Madame Gorgeous plot point into that, too, and was again told no by the
Universal bigwigs), but there’s still the air of a much better movie hiding in
the interstices of the one we actually have.
