The Dentist
Never Give a Sucker an Even Break
Edward Cline
1941
W.C. Fields was born William Claude Dukenfield, (January 29, 1880—December 25, 1946) in Darby PA, about 6 miles from Philadeplphia. A town he seemed not to be fond of. He reportedly quipped that on a quiz show “the first prize was one week in Philadelphia, the second prize was two weeks in Philadelphia” Another “anti-Philadelphia joke” attributed to him is the line “I spent a week in Philadelphia the day before yesterday”, Fields, who kept his initials and shortened his family name, is the son of a Cockney immigrant (or one from Sheffield) and a native Philadelphian mother. The reports of his childhood vary dramatically and according to some he embellished them in a negative way relative to his family and making out that he had lived on the streets using only his wits. He claimed to have had a terrible relationship with his alcoholic father and ran away from home when he was 11 years old, He had little formal schooling and then went to work selling vegetables out of his father’s horse drawn cart.
Some writers indicate that at 17 he was living at home and performing as a juggler in church and theater shows. There is evidence that in 1904 Field’s father visited him for 2 months while he was performing in England. Fields appears to have made it possible for his father to retire and bought him a summer home. He encouraged both parents and siblings to learn to write and read so they could write letter to him.
Fields was said to be an alcoholic, although there is evidence that his drinking got heavier later in life. He apparently didn’t drink when he was younger because it would have interfered with his control as a juggler. Later in life after a number of unhappy events he began and often had a flask with him when they will filming.
One of the more interesting things was that his stage persona was not particularly sympathetic – something most comedians feel is necessary. Rather he displays an extreme dislike for dogs and children – so much so that at a dinner one of the guests (humorist Leo Rosten) said of him that “no man who hates dogs and children can be all bad”. The line has often been attributed to Fields. There is evidence that he in fact owned a dog and was very responsive to children in his real life. He answer letters sent to him by youngsters saying that they wanted to be jugglers and performed for children. He was married to Harriet Hughes who worked in his juggling act with him. They had a son William Claude Dukenfield. W.C. and Hattie separated but she would give him a divorce. There is some idea that Hattie badmouthed W.C. to their son and he and his father rarely saw one another, but Fields predicted he would come to know the truth, which apparently happened and Fields actually saw his first grandchild before he died. Field had in fact sent money to his family regularly no matter how much or how little he was making.
A girl friend Bessie Poole claimed Fields was the father of her son William Rexford Field Morris but neither could give up touring to take care of him, so he was left with foster parents who were friends of Poole. He and Poole were together about 10 years. In 1927 she signed an affidavit that Fields was not the father and she got $20,000. Despite this, Fields contributed to her son’s support until he was 19.
He (and the studios) made some attempt for his stage image to be his off screen one as well.
After his start as a juggler he made a number of stage appearances on Broadway, and was a performer in all the Ziegfield Follies from 1915-1921 He appears in the cast lists for 1915 1916 1918 1920 and 1921
Fields first appears in films in 1915, which are silent so his highly recognized voice an grandiloquent vocabulary are not yet present for the audience. The films are “Poole Sharks” and “His Lordship’s Dilemma”. Because of his work on the stage he did not appear in a film again until 1924
In his early days he worked largely for Paramount and made only one film for Warner Bros.
When sound arrived, Fields made 13 feature films for Paramount, and some short subjects for Mack Sennett which were distributed through Paramount.
In 1933 he makes a film called International House and this film makes him a star. The film is largely a number of slapstick skits and acts brought together under a rather loose plot. Fields has a major part and became famous in films from it. Supposedly there is an outtake from the film which shows the set rocking back and forth as a result of the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, but it has been demonstrated to be a hoax.
In 1935 he played Micawber in MGM’s David Copperfield.He also recreated his main stage performance in Poppy for Paramount.
By 1936 his health was slipping and he was unable to work in films.Except for a part in The Big Broadcast of 1938 his DTs blocked producers from using him in films. He made a short radio speech and was picked up as a radio performer for ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy .Charlie McCarthy. He asked for and got his film salary of $5,000 a week. He and McCarthy traded insults such as:
Fields would refer to Charlie as a “wood pecker’s pin-up boy” or a termite flop house. Charlie would respond with insults about Field’s drinking. The relationship between them went over well with audiences with the result that they were teamed for a film by Universal called You Can’t Cheat and Honest Man (1939). In 1940 he made My Little Chickadee with Mae West who wrote the script except for an extended scene in the bar which Fields wrote. He film spoofs themselves and the western genre. Both performers are famous for specific lines in their earlier films which are played with and reversed in the film. When the film appeared the studio gave equal credit in the writing to Fields and West, which infuriate her and she refused to work with his again.
Another one of his films which was made in 1940, The Bank Dick is one of three of his films, It’s a Gift, So’s Your Old Man and The Bank Dick are on the National Registry. Among the more memorable scenes in one in the bar where he talks with Shemp Howard who would later become one of the three stooges.
Fields was a devout atheist and had many books on religion. It is claimed that when he was dying he was caught reading the bible. When he was asked what he was doing he said he was looking for loopholes.(This also appears to have been apocryphal)
As a performer he has certain characteristics. He often went after kids and dogs which should have made him unlikeable, but the audience was never sure how either would retaliate.
He made asides all through his films in which he commented to himself (and the audience) in muttering phrases. He had a findness for playing with words either as hyper dialogue or in near profanities or with odd ball names:
These odd names also turn up when he was writing for his films and didn’t want to use his own name. Names like Mahatama Kane Jeeves (My hat, my cane Jeeves) were not uncommon, Otis Criblecoblis which plays with the idea of cobbling together scribbles.
He played all kinds of con men, hustlers and so on. Sometimes he appears as a victim – especially of women and a family that doesn’t appreciate him.
As a juggler and pool player he often does tricks with his hat, cane and other objects.
He is belligerent but at the same time afraid of everybody – kind of frightened bully.
A commemorative postage stamp showing him as he appears in his films and also juggling was issued by the US Post office on the 100th anniversary of his birth January 29, 1880—December 25, 1946
Never Give a Sucker an Even Break is his last starring film. He was 61. The film is written by Otis Criblecoblis, who is really Fields
The level of literacy in many of Fields's movies is quite high. In My Little Chickadee (1940), which he wrote with his co-star Mae West, he refers to her character, whose name is Flower Belle Lee, as "yon damsel with the hothouse cognomen." Later in the movie he tells her that she is "the epitome of erudition," adding, "a double superlative. Can you handle it?" (Miss West replies: "Yeah, and I can kick it around, too.") There is even in this movie an example of what I believe academic literary critics nowadays call "intertextuality": "Come up and see me sometime," is Fields's final utterance, echoing the most famous of all Mae West one-liners; to it, she replies, "Yeah, I'll do that, my little chickadee."
The great early movie comedians all had their own specific character that they had crafted imprint: Charlie Chaplin's was able to find something sad out of his character's ability to bounce back; Buster Keaton's character with his stone face and melancholy resignation to whatever happened coupled with a high threshold for frustration; the Marx Brothers' imsane brand of anarchy. Fields's comic character seems to some to have been the most highly formed of the lot. In the films he had control of --he often wrote his own material, or used writers who knew his character -- then, as Louvish says, "the comic business, the gags, always illuminate[d] character, and all comedy stem[med] from the character, not from some mechanical plan."
One can discenr two different Fields characters. The high-toned, often grouchy con man was one; the greatly put-upon husband or "sucker" was the other. He frequently is the bully who then gets his. From scene to scene and from movie to movie he could slide easily from one to the next, and he could also play his con man for pathos, as in his brilliant portrayal of Mr. Micawber, the elaborate word using optimist, as he does in George Cukor's version of David Copperfield (1935). But there was no doubt in Fields's own mind about which was the harder trick to pull off. He once told a journalist: "Making you laugh at the hard-boiled three-card-monte man who is trimming a sucker is one thing--and not so easy--but making you laugh at the sucker is something else."
Notice Fields’ elaboration of language. In addition to being a juggler, pool player he was also an avid reader with a fondness for Dickens (from whom he “stole” the idea of odd names) Hence he was very happy to have had the chance to play
AFTER the FILM
The film plays with the idea of being a real story with Fields, Gloria Jean and Franklin Pangborn all using their own names.
Mrs. Hemoglobin (Margaret Dumont) is one of Field’s strange names
While Fields often mutters to himself, he rarely addressed the camera directly, but he does in this film where he comments on the soda fountain having been changed from a bar room because the censors wouldn’t allow it. This a kind of acknowledgement of the fact this is a film, which is interesting since the film contains a film within a film and this direct address is not in the interior film. The interior film is certainly for more surreal as Pangborn continues to point out.
The musical numbers in the film are almost all “performance pieces” that is they all appear in a performance context in the real world. There are the two in the film studio – the screen test and the rehearsal while the workmen are trying to build the set. The next becomes a bit more surreal, in Gloria Jean’s singing in the carriage, although they meet a group of people singing together. Only the jazzed up “Comin Thru the Rye” is out of a “musical” where even if we grant the character’s singing as vaguely possible, the appearance of the orchestra as "back up" for her from the radio makes us question the nature of a diegetic vs. non diegetic distinction. After all a radio would not play ony the back up version of "Comin' thru the Rye". So in the “real world” the music is “realistic”. In the filmed world when the real characters of the film appear it is potentially realistic and finally when we ae with a character who exists only in the film within the film do we get something more like a “musical” approach to the music. Remember that different genres have different rules which the audience accepts - that is there is a different suspension of disbelief in different genres.
Notice the repetition of line from "The Dentist" into Never Give a Sucker an Even Break about the dog bite on the ankle. Some comedians “recycle” lines. This is not the same as a “running joke” in which the same lne or event reoccurs through the piece (“Not a night for man or Beast” in The Fatal Glass of Beer”)
Well known for his “hostility” towards dogs and children (Children should neither be seen or heard from - ever again.. I like children - fried. I never met a kid I liked. “I like children. If they're properly cooked.” Notice the kids in this film Butch (Billy Lenhart) and Buddy (Kenneth Brown) harass him from the start and the threatens them with one of his word play lines about a cat and a stocking (a sock in the puss). They also throug a brick at him, but they avoid any real attacks or retaliations. They do howver also practice their own form of annoyance by shooting pits at Mr. Pangborn and getting the foreman into trouble. The gorilla and the great dane seem more of a problem to others in the film than Fields. So in this film som of the attacks on Fields have been "diplaced" on others. He also, like the two children manages to get others in trouble for his actions as, for example, when he manages to get the Russian in the plane to attack the Englishman who has NOT hit him with the polo stick, but Fields himself who did.
Generally children (and dogs) often best him.
“The advantages of whiskey over dogs are legion. Whiskey does not need to be periodically wormed, it does not need to be fed, it never requires a special kennel, it has no toenails to be clipped or coat to be stripped. Whiskey sits quietly in its special nook until you want it. True, whiskey has a nasty habit of running out, but then so does a dog.”
The film recognizes other comic films as it goes along from the falling wall that nearly hits Mr. Pangborn (Buster Keaton's famous falling building) to the final chase scene with the car, the police and the fire truck is straight out of the silent movies.
1941 W.C. Fields was born William Claude Dukenfield, (January 29, 1880—December 25, 1946) in Darby PA, about 6 miles from Philadeplphia. A town he seemed not to be fond of. He reportedly quipped that on a quiz show “the first prize was one week in Philadelphia, the second prize was two weeks in Philadelphia” Another “anti-Philadelphia joke” attributed to him is the line “I spent a week in Philadelphia the day before yesterday”, Fields, who kept his initials and shortened his family name, is the son of a Cockney immigrant (or one from Sheffield) and a native Philadelphian mother. The reports of his childhood vary dramatically and according to some he embellished them in a negative way relative to his family and making out that he had lived on the streets using only his wits. He claimed to have had a terrible relationship with his alcoholic father and ran away from home when he was 11 years old, He had little formal schooling and then went to work selling vegetables out of his father’s horse drawn cart. Some writers indicate that at 17 he was living at home and performing as a juggler in church and theater shows. There is evidence that in 1904 Field’s father visited him for 2 months while he was performing in England. Fields appears to have made it possible for his father to retire and bought him a summer home. He encouraged both parents and siblings to learn to write and read so they could write letter to him. Fields was said to be an alcoholic, although there is evidence that his drinking got heavier later in life. He apparently didn’t drink when he was younger because it would have interfered with his control as a juggler. Later in life after a number of unhappy events he began and often had a flask with him when they will filming. One of the more interesting things was that his stage persona was not particularly sympathetic – something most comedians feel is necessary. Rather he displays an extreme dislike for dogs and children – so much so that at a dinner one of the guests (humorist Leo Rosten) said of him that “no man who hates dogs and children can be all bad”. The line has often been attributed to Fields. There is evidence that he in fact owned a dog and was very responsive to children in his real life. He answer letters sent to him by youngsters saying that they wanted to be jugglers and performed for children. He was married to Harriet Hughes who worked in his juggling act with him. They had a son William Claude Dukenfield. W.C. and Hattie separated but she would give him a divorce. There is some idea that Hattie badmouthed W.C. to their son and he and his father rarely saw one another, but Fields predicted he would come to know the truth, which apparently happened and Fields actually saw his first grandchild before he died. Field had in fact sent money to his family regularly no matter how much or how little he was making. A girl friend Bessie Poole claimed Fields was the father of her son William Rexford Field Morris but neither could give up touring to take care of him, so he was left with foster parents who were friends of Poole. He and Poole were together about 10 years. In 1927 she signed an affidavit that Fields was not the father and she got $20,000. Despite this, Fields contributed to her son’s support until he was 19. He (and the studios) made some attempt for his stage image to be his off screen one as well. After his start as a juggler he made a number of stage appearances on Broadway, and was a performer in all the Ziegfield Follies from 1915-1921 He appears in the cast lists for 1915 1916 1918 1920 and 1921 Fields first appears in films in 1915, which are silent so his highly recognized voice an grandiloquent vocabulary are not yet present for the audience. The films are “Poole Sharks” and “His Lordship’s Dilemma”. Because of his work on the stage he did not appear in a film again until 1924 In his early days he worked largely for Paramount and made only one film for Warner Bros. When sound arrived, Fields made 13 feature films for Paramount, and some short subjects for Mack Sennett which were distributed through Paramount. In 1933 he makes a film called International House and this film makes him a star. The film is largely a number of slapstick skits and acts brought together under a rather loose plot. Fields has a major part and became famous in films from it. Supposedly there is an outtake from the film which shows the set rocking back and forth as a result of the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, but it has been demonstrated to be a hoax. In 1935 he played Micawber in MGM’s David Copperfield.He also recreated his main stage performance in Poppy for Paramount. By 1936 his health was slipping and he was unable to work in films.Except for a part in The Big Broadcast of 1938 his DTs blocked producers from using him in films. He made a short radio speech and was picked up as a radio performer for ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy .Charlie McCarthy. He asked for and got his film salary of $5,000 a week. He and McCarthy traded insults such as: Fields: "Tell me, Charles, is it true your father was a gate-leg table?" McCarthy: "If it is, your father was under it!" Fields would refer to Charlie as a “wood pecker’s pin-up boy” or a termite flop house. Charlie would respond with insults about Field’s drinking. The relationship between them went over well with audiences with the result that they were teamed for a film by Universal called You Can’t Cheat and Honest Man (1939). In 1940 he made My Little Chickadee with Mae West who wrote the script except for an extended scene in the bar which Fields wrote. He film spoofs themselves and the western genre. Both performers are famous for specific lines in their earlier films which are played with and reversed in the film. When the film appeared the studio gave equal credit in the writing to Fields and West, which infuriate her and she refused to work with his again. Another one of his films which was made in 1940, The Bank Dick is one of three of his films, It’s a Gift, So’s Your Old Man and The Bank Dick are on the National Registry. Among the more memorable scenes in one in the bar where he talks with Shemp Howard who would later become one of the three stooges. Fields was a devout atheist and had many books on religion. It is claimed that when he was dying he was caught reading the bible. When he was asked what he was doing he said he was looking for loopholes. As a performer he has certain characteristics. He often went after kids and dogs which should have made him unlikeable, but the audience was never sure how either would retaliate. He made asides all through his films in which he commented to himself (and the audience) in muttering phrases. He had a findness for playing with words either as hyper dialogue or in near profanities or with odd ball names: Larson E. (Larceny) Whipsnade Egbert Sounsé (soused) T. Frothingill Bellows These odd names also turn up when he was writing for his films and didn’t want to use his own name. Names like Mahatama Kane Jeeves (My hat, my cane Jeeves) were not uncommon, Otis Criblecoblis which plays with the idea of cobbling together scribbles. He played all kinds of con men, hustlers and so on. Sometimes he appears as a victim – especially of women and a family that doesn’t appreciate him. As a juggler and pool player he often does ricks with his hat and other objects. He is belligerent but at the same time afraid of everybody – kid of frightened bully. A commemorative postage stamp showing him as he appears in his films and also juggling was issued by the US Post office on the 100th anniversary of his birth January 29, 1880—December 25, 1946 Never Give a Sucker an Even Break is his last starring film. He was 61. The film is written by Otis Criblecoblis, who is really Fields The level of literacy in many of Fields's movies is quite high. In My Little Chickadee (1940), which he wrote with his co-star Mae West, he refers to her character, whose name is Flower Belle Lee, as "yon damsel with the hothouse cognomen." Later in the movie he tells her that she is "the epitome of erudition," adding, "a double superlative. Can you handle it?" (Miss West replies: "Yeah, and I can kick it around, too.") There is even in this movie an example of what I believe academic literary critics nowadays call "intertextuality": "Come up and see me sometime," is Fields's final utterance, echoing the most famous of all Mae West one-liners; to it, she replies, "Yeah, I'll do that, my little chickadee." The great early movie comedians all had their own imprint: Charlie Chaplin's ability to wring pathos out of a charming underdog resilience; Buster Keaton's passive melancholy with its high threshold for frustration; the Marx Brothers' let-'er-rip anarchical zaniness. Fields's comic character may have been the most highly formed of the lot. When he was in control of a movie--he often wrote his own material, or used writers who knew his character the way a bespoke tailor knows his customer--then, as Louvish says, "the comic business, the gags, always illuminate[d] character, and all comedy stem[med] from the character, not from some mechanical plan." Actually, there were two Fields characters. The high-toned, often grouchy con man was one; the greatly put-upon husband or "sucker" was the other. Of the two chief Fieldsian characters, the con man and the degraded husband, my own preference is for the latter. My Little Chickadee and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941) have their fine moments, but I like Fields when he is less snarly, less frightening, less likely to cuff a child too enthusiastically; when he is not adding to the world's anarchy but is instead--like the rest of us, if to a much higher power--a victim of it. From movie to movie he could slide easily from one to the next, and he could also play his con man for pathos, as in his brilliant portrayal of Mr. Micawber, the sesquipedalian optimist, in George Cukor's version of David Copperfield (1935). But there was no doubt in Fields's own mind about which was the harder trick to pull off. He once told a journalist: "Making you laugh at the hard-boiled three-card-monte man who is trimming a sucker is one thing--and not so easy--but making you laugh at the sucker is something else." In the end, though, the myths may crumble, but he remains our favorite knight-errant, shambling, incoherent, defeated yet unbowed as he tilts against everything proper and overstuffed. When Fields as Wilkins Micawber comes home in ``David Copperfield'' and announces to his wife, ``I have thwarted the malevolent machinations of our scurrilous enemies--in short, I have arrived!'' we laugh and cheer. Once again he has not just made us laugh; he has lifted our hearts in the same moment. As Fields himself would say, ``It baffles science!'' Notice Fields’ elaboration of language. In addition to being a juggler, pool player he was also an avid reader with a fondness for Dickens (from whom he “stole” the idea of odd names) Hence he was very happy to have had the chance to play AFTER the FILM The film plays with the idea of being a real story with Fields, Gloria Jean and Franklin Pangborn all using their own names. Mrs. Hemoglobin (Margaret Dumont) is one of Field’s strange names While Fields often mutters to himself, he rarely addressed the camera directly, but he does in this film where he comments on the soda fountain having been changed from a bar room because the censors wouldn’t allow it. This a kind of acknowledgement of the fact this is a film, which is interesting since the film contains a film within a film. The interior film is certainly for more surreal as Pangborn continues to point out. The musical numbers in the film are almost all “performance pieces” that is they all appear in a performance context in the real world. There are the two in the film studio – the screen test and the rehearsal while the workmen are trying to build the set. The next becomes a bit more surreal, in Gloria Jean’s singing in the carriage, although they meet a group of people singing together. Only the jazzed up “Comin Thru the Rye” is out of a “musical” where even if we grant the character’s singing as vaguely possible, the appearance of the orchestra as back up for her makes us question the nature of a diegetic vs. non diegetic distinction. So in the “real world” the music is “realistic”. In the filmed world when the real characters of the film appear it is potentially realistic and finally when we ae with a character who exists only in the film within the film do we get a “musical” approach to the music. Notice the repetition of line from The Dentist into Never Give a Sucker an Even Break about the dog bite on the ankle. Some comedians “recycle” lines. This is not the same as a “running joke” in which the same lne or event reoccurs through the piece (“Not a night for man or Beast” in The Fatal Glass of Beer”) Well known for his “hostility” towards dogs and children (Children should neither be seen or heard from - ever again.. I like children - fried. I never met a kid I liked. “I like children. If they're properly cooked.” Generally children (and dogs) often best him. “The advantages of whiskey over dogs are legion. Whiskey does not need to be periodically wormed, it does not need to be fed, it never requires a special kennel, it has no toenails to be clipped or coat to be stripped. Whiskey sits quietly in its special nook until you want it. True, whiskey has a nasty habit of running out, but then so does a dog.” The wise and intelligent are coming belatedly to realize that alcohol, and not the dog, is man's best friend. Rover is taking a beating -- and he should. The final chase scene is straight out of the silent movies