The henpecked hustler

THE COMIC ASIDES AND DOUBLE-TAKES of W.C. Fields always were a welcomed fifth-column attack on the pestilence of day-to-day living during the Depression years. His entertaining cynicism seems even more pertinent today. In fascinating fashion, Fields vacillated between two screen personas--the huckster and henpecked husband.

Fields' trickster is in the literary tradition of the late 19th century, America's golden age of the confidence man. Like the classic pioneering diddlers who put a creative spin on Yankee ingenuity, the Fields manipulator kept on the move. The London Times said of his 1936 "Poppy" characterization: "Like all great showmen, he knows ... the moment when the prudent man stops talking and makes hurriedly for open country--preferably on his accuser's horse." Movement protected his sneaky character from the law, creditors, and suckers who had wised up to the comedian's imaginative gambling skills. Being forever on the road offered opportunity as well as escape. As humorist Johnson J. Hooper has his notable huckster Simon Suggs observe, "It is good to be shifty in a new country." Like Suggs' old Southwest diddler. Fields' con artist engaged in small-time operations that did little, if any, harm.

In comic contrast, Fields' antihero plays the most entertaining of contemporary victims, a browbeaten family man anchored to a going-nowhere position in small-town America--though his best showcase of this world, "It's a Gift" (1934), eventually offers an 11th-hour reprieve to a California paradise. (The turnaround is so extreme, even for a comedy, that one might best "read" it as a satire of happy endings.) While Fields is inspired in either comedic mode--huckster or antihero--his henpecked husband occasionally lets a bit of larceny come through. For instance, when his screen wife in "Gift" forces him to share a sandwich with their brat of a son, the comedian bends the meat onto his side before dividing the bread.

Ironically, the same year "Gift" opened, Fields made what is arguably the comedian's best huckster picture, "The Old-Fashioned Way." From its opening moments, "Way" is a case study of any-con-for-the-production. The movie begins with a sheriff at the train depot about to serve Fields' showman, "The Great McGonigle," with a legal writ to keep him and his theatre troupe in town because of unpaid bills. Yet, McGonigle manages to come up behind the sheriff and wastes no time in setting fire to the document, which the officer is holding behind his back. Fields allows himself to be seen just as the blazing writ is beyond rescue. The mistakenly confident sheriff then tells him, "I have something for you!" As the surprised constable produces a flaming document from behind him, Fields (with the timing of the comic juggler he was) uses this nonconventional blaze to light his cigar. McGonigle then tops the laugh by politely thanking the still stunned law enforcement officer.

The manipulative McGonigle not only gets the best of adult establishment figures, he physically takes on oppressive youngsters like Baby LeRoy (Albert Wendelschaffer), managing to give him a kick in the backside. Comparing Fields' boot to the signature leg action of Charlie Chaplin's Tramp, a New York World Telegram critic went on to celebrate this kick as a comic catharsis, "[releasing] the suppressed desires of countless adults who have nearly been driven crazy by the abuses of some particularly noxious infant whose fond parents just beam on their off-spring's antics and consider them cute."

While Fields' alternate comedy personas were assisted greatly by the authors of two 1920s stage productions--Dorothy Donnelly's Broadway huckster play, "Poppy" (1923, with W.C. starring as the title character con man), and J.P. McEvoy's antiheroic musical comedy revue, "The Comic Supplement" (1925, in which Fields starred as part of the "Ziegfeld Follies")--the comedian's own writing roots were tied to the world of the antihero. Between 1918-30, Fields registered 23 separate comedy documents on 16 subjects. This least known of his then-professional activities now looms as a fascinating look at the evolution of his antihero--his time usurped by dominating women, machines, and the urban setting in general.

Given that Fields was fond of showcasing his antiheroic screen comedy in a world of small town, mealy-mouthed sanctimoniousness reflects his undoubted influence by what literature terms "the revolt from the village." This movement of the late 1910s and 1920s focused on the dead-end hypocrisy of small town life, but it was, according to literary scholar Anthony Channell Hilfer, "an overall attack on middle-class American civilization." This new artistic wrinkle was precipitated by poet Edgar Lee Masters' "Spoon River Anthology" (1915), although it took several years for the influence of the book to permeate popular culture.