Schede film/Programme Notes
Introduction
“Silent” and “W.C. Fields” might at first seem an irreconcilable contradiction. The inimitable wheezy whine, the yelps of pain or outrage, caustic asides squeezed from the corner of a mouth ever pursed in suspicion, bursts of orotund Dickensian verbosity, words savored till they revealed hidden depths of strange suggestion, the occasional ditty tunelessly vented under the influence of alcohol – these are indispensable to our precious image of the great reprobate. Sound is the essence of some of the great recurrent gags too, like the porch scene, posited in It’s the Old Army Game and perfected in It’s a Gift.
But Fields’s comic resources were rich enough to work with images alone, when the need arose. Like most of the great silent clowns, his schooling had been in vaudeville. Working in vast theatres with no means of sound amplification, all vaudeville artists understood that their acts had to offer strong visual attraction in addition to all else, for the sake of the man out of earshot in the back of the gallery. When Fields embarked on his stage career as comedy tramp juggler in 1897 at the age of 18, he evidently used a lot of comic patter, but from 1900, when he began to tour his act in continental Europe, he mostly dropped talk, to concentrate on visual comedy.
Following a supporting role as a British Sergeant in Janice Meredith, his appearance in D.W. Griffith’s Sally of the Sawdust (1925) was auspicious and seminal to his future film career. The character of the sideshow charlatan Professor Eustace McGargle, which he had already created in the stage production of Dorothy Donnelly’s Poppy (1923), was to be constantly recreated in various guises, both in Fields’s silent and sound films. It’s the Old Army Game and So’s Your Old Man confirmed his life-long taste for bizarre and preferably slightly indecent names, like Elmer Prettywillie and Sam Bisbee.
Local producers attempted to turn many celebrities from nearby Broadway into movie stars, but success was far from automatic: Ed Wynn never became a favorite of film audiences, while Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers, and Fields himself were all to find talkies more congenial than silent pictures. But we should still salute Paramount’s East Coast producer William Le Baron for persisting so hard as the patron of Fields, a Ziegfeld Follies favorite. Le Baron, who also championed Mae West and the comedy team of Wheeler and Woolsey, spent years, right through the sound period, tinkering with the irascible persona Fields had developed on Broadway, trying to shove this square peg into the round hole of Hollywood cinema. The distance between what Fields had to offer and what Hollywood was willing to accept was a considerable gulf, but not, ultimately, unbridgeable. – Richard Koszarski, David Robinson
Schede film/Programme Notes
POOL SHARKS (Gaumont Casino Star Comedies, US 1915)
Regia/dir: Edwin Middleton; cast: W.C. Fields, Bud Ross(?);35mm, ?? ft., ??’ (?? fps), tinted?/toned?; fonte copia/print source: UCLA Film & Television Archive, Los Angeles.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.
The Ziegfeld Follies served New York’s local film community as an all-purpose casting directory, providing everyone from dancers and showgirls (Marion Davies, Louise Brooks) to the most gifted comic performers in the American theater (Will Rogers, Eddie Cantor, Bert Williams, Ed Wynn, W.C. Fields). Both Williams (Biograph) and Fields (Gaumont) made their first screen appearances for local producers in the wake of the international Chaplin mania, but neither was especially suited to the unique demands of the silent comedy short. Fields made Pool Sharks at the Gaumont studio in Flushing, Queens, a facility originally built by Herbert and Alice Guy Blaché. Although the film features the “pool routine” Fields was then performing in the Follies, the trick effects are achieved via animation, and not through the use of the specially rigged table used in his act.
Edwin Middleton was a busy East Coast director who had recently completed prestigious feature films starring Thomas Jefferson (Rip Van Winkle) and Lillian Russell (Wildfire). When Pool Sharks resurfaced in the 1960s his film was praised by William K. Everson as “a minor masterpiece when viewed in the context of its period, and certainly a major milestone in the early evolution of screen comedy”. On the other hand, Simon Louvish, a recent Fields biographer, dismisses it as “a dud”, interesting mainly for Fields’s appropriation of Charlie Chaplin’s character instead of the persona he had already developed on his own. – Richard Koszarski
JANICE MEREDITH (dir. E. Mason Hopper, 1924)
SALLY OF THE SAWDUST (dir. D.W. Griffith, 1925)
IT’S THE OLD ARMY GAME (Famous Players-Lasky Corp., US 1926)
Regia/dir: Edward Sutherland; scen: Tom Geraghty, J. Clarkson Miller, from material by J.P. McEvoy; didascalie/titles: Ralph Spence; f./ph: Alvin Wyckoff; cast: W.C. Fields (Elmer Prettywillie), Louise Brooks (Mildred Marshall), Blanche Ring (Tessie Overholt), William Gaxton (George Parker), Mary Foy (Sarah Pancoast), Mickey Bennett (Mickey), Josephine Dunn, Jack Luden (society bathers), George Currie (artist), Elise Cavanna (drugstore customer); data uscita/released: Paramount, 24.5.1926; 35mm??, ?? ft., ??’ (?? fps), tinted?/toned?; fonte copia/print source: ??.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.
Much of the credit for Fields’s transformation from vaudeville sketch artist to fully developed screen personality can be attributed to William Le Baron, whom Louise Brooks considered “the most remarkable man who ever was in pictures.” Le Baron had been editor of Collier’s magazine, and from 1919-24 was “director general” at Hearst’s Cosmopolitan studio. From then on, as Simon Louvish notes, whenever Le Baron was in a position of power, Fields would be making movies. The comedian arrived in Astoria as the co-star of Poppy, a Broadway success which D.W. Griffith had been contracted to direct. Fields was unhappy that much of his role in the film version, Sally of the Sawdust, was reduced in order to enhance Carol Dempster’s part, but he always spoke highly of Griffith and immediately went into another Griffith/Dempster production, That Royle Girl.
Neither of those films offered the kind of dramatic structure on which a continuing comic personality could be established. The first real Fields vehicle, It’s the Old Army Game, was shot during a month-long junket in Florida, largely in and around Ocala, a small inland town in the north-central part of the state whose local architecture did not look especially Southern, and was therefore a favorite of wintering Paramount crews. Considering the amount of drinking done on the trip – Brooks remembered the unit being called back to New York when Le Baron noticed that the rushes were “all tilted” – the film is surprisingly coherent. (Within a few months of their return, Brooks had married the film’s director, Eddie Sutherland.)
The narrative, such as it is, was pieced together by Fields and his cronies from his favorite theatrical routines: the drugstore; trying to get a night’s sleep on the back porch as a coconut clatters down the stairs; holding a barbaric picnic on the front lawn of a grand estate (filmed at El Mirasol, the Edward T. Stotesbury mansion in Palm Beach). Many of these routines had originated as Ziegfeld Follies sketches written for Fields by J.P. [Joseph Patrick] McEvoy, credited here as the source of the original story material. The comedian had been playing these skits for years, and would continue to spin variations until the end of his career. But they had never been designed to support a continuing comic character, and could hardly sustain a series of Paramount features. The material appeared again in Paramount’s talkie remake of It’s the Old Army Game, retitled It’s a Gift, in 1934. – Richard Koszarski
SO’S YOUR OLD MAN (Famous Players-Lasky Corp., US 1926)
Regia/dir: Gregory La Cava; scen: J. Clarkson Miller, dal racconto/from the story “Mr. Bisbee’s Princess” di/by Julian Street, ad: Howard Emmett Rogers; mont./ed: Ralph Block; didascalie/titles: Julian Johnson; disegni didascalie/art titles: John Held, Jr.; f./ph: George Webber; cast: W.C. Fields (Sam Bisbee), Alice Joyce (Princess Lescaboura), Charles Rogers (Kenneth Murchison), Kittens Reichert (Alice Bisbee), Marcia Harris (Mrs. Bisbee), Julia Ralph (Mrs. Murchison), Frank Montgomery (Jeff), Jerry Sinclair (Al); data uscita/released: Paramount, 25.10.1926; 35mm, ?? ft., ??’ (?? fps), tinted?/toned?; fonte copia/print source: Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.
It’s the Old Army Game is funny, but if Fields was going to continue to star in features he needed to develop an empathetic screen character that audiences could follow from one picture to the next. Le Baron’s answer was So’s Your Old Man, the adaptation of an award-winning short story by Howard Emmett Rogers, where the humor came largely from character and situation, not just from the set-piece theatrics of Fields’s vaudeville routines. The film also benefited from the presence of a much better director, Gregory La Cava, who had considerable experience as a writer of animated cartoons and comedy shorts.
Fields played a suburban householder living in a small New Jersey town. When his demonstration of an unbreakable automobile windshield goes awry, he contemplates suicide but is distracted by a chance meeting with a visiting European princess (a wonderful performance from Alice Joyce). Fields did manage to jam in his golf routine (which we will see again in The Golf Specialist), but what is most memorable about the film is its sharply satirical picture of small-town life, clearly influenced by the studio’s recent production of The Show Off. The suicide episode, for example, would have been played as slapstick in It’s the Old Army Game only a few months earlier. This time, with better developed characters and a stronger narrative line, it offers more than just a couple of laughs. So’s Your Old Man was loosely reworked by Paramount in 1934 as You’re Telling Me!, which also features Fields’s classic golf routine.
While Paramount used the Astoria studio as a testing ground for Broadway talent (like Fields and Brooks), it also operated a formal school of acting to develop talented unknowns into potential Paramount stars. The most successful graduates were Thelma Todd, later a popular comedienne, and Charles “Buddy” Rogers, future star of Wings and husband to Mary Pickford. Although such results were not inconsequential, the studio considered the school to be more trouble than it was worth and closed it after graduating its second class in 1926. – Richard Koszarski
RUNNING WILD (Paramount Famous Lasky Corp., US 1927)
Regia/dir., sogg./story: Gregory La Cava; ad: Roy Briant; f./ph: Paul Vogel; cast:W.C. Fields (Elmer Finch), Mary Brian (Elizabeth), Claud Buchanan (Jerry Harvey), Marie Shotwell (Mrs. Finch), Barney Raskle (Junior), Ed Roseman (Arvo, the hypnotist), Rex (himself);data uscita/released: Paramount, 11.6.1927; 35mm, ?? ft., ??’ (?? fps), tinted?/toned?; fonte copia/print source: Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.
Jesse Lasky had set up William Le Baron in the East as a counter to B.P. Schulberg in the West, intending to invigorate Paramount production with a spirit of friendly competition; instead he created a destructive rivalry between the two studios, largely characterized by what he considered “silly jealousy and intrigue”.The final straw proved to be the production of Beau Geste, which had been purchased directly by Lasky at the recommendation of Walter Wanger. Because it is set largely in the desert, the film would obviously have to be made in California, but Schulberg rebelled against the project being forced upon him and refused to accept it. Lasky turned to William Le Baron, who was more than happy to send one of his New York crews to film Paramount’s biggest production of the year right in B.P. Schulberg’s backyard. As Lasky recalled, “The Eastern personnel was sent West, and Schulberg was obliged to furnish studio accommodations for the interlopers and to watch the picture being shot in his own bailiwick under the Astoria banner by Herbert Brenon, now assigned to the Eastern company, and supervised by Julian Johnson, who had been until then our Eastern story editor.”
Brenon brought along an East Coast cameraman, an East Coast art director, and a raft of East Coast stars. The main title on the film carried the credit, “William Le Baron, Assoc. Producer, Eastern Studio”. This was more than Schulberg could bear, and he called up his strongest arguments to persuade Lasky to stop dividing his resources and shut down the operation in New York. Lasky was by now fed up with the constant bickering between Schulberg and Le Baron, and threw in the towel. “I had hoped that forcing the two studios to co-operate on the same picture might ease the situation, but it worsened, if anything. The only solution seemed to be to concentrate all production in Hollywood.”
Running Wild was the last silent film Paramount made at Astoria (the studio can be seen in the background of one street exterior, looking more like a railroad terminal than a movie lot). Still uncertain of how audiences would react to the rascally character he had created on stage, it offers two versions of Fields for the price of one: the downtrodden bourgeois favored by Le Baron’s writing staff, and an unpleasantly assertive blowhard more reminiscent of his stage persona. The trick would work better in Le Baron’s 1935 near-remake, Man on the Flying Trapeze (which also featured Mary Brian reprising her original role as the supportive daughter).
Gregory La Cava finished shooting Running Wild on 28 April 1927, at which point Paramount shut down the Astoria studio and relocated most of its top contract talent to California. Le Baron had already moved to Joseph P. Kennedy’s FBO studio, soon to become RKO. Ironically, even as Paramount set about closing its “redundant” silent film studio, Warner Bros. and Fox were already filming talking pictures at their own New York studios. Zukor and Lasky would reopen Astoria for sound within 15 months. – Richard Koszarski
THE GOLF SPECIALIST (Radio Pictures, US 1930)
Regia/dir: Monte Brice; prod: Lou Brock; f./ph: Frank Zucker; mont./ed: Russell Sheilds; scg./des: Ernst Fegté; rec./sd: George Oschmann; cast: W.C. Fields; data uscita/released: RKO Distributing Corp., 22.8.1930; 35mm, ?? ft., ??’ (?? fps), tinted?/toned?; fonte copia/print source: Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.
Fields had followed the rest of the Astoria unit to Hollywood in 1927, but the 3 silent features he made there were unsuccessful, and he had returned to Broadway. By 1930 he had the choice of continuing in the theater – which was suffering from the effects of the Depression and competition from the cinema – or making another attempt at the movies, a medium at which he had already failed. He accepted an offer to make one short film for RKO, where his old patron, William Le Baron, was now in charge of production.
A new “major” studio organized on the arrival of talkies, RKO was filming most of its short subject releases in New York, mainly series comedies and musicals featuring acts like Clark & McCullough or the Yiddish dialect comedian Nat Carr. The films were made in the modern Gramercy studio on East 24th Street, which David Sarnoff, as part of his continuing battle with AT&T, had equipped with the latest RCA Photophone technology. In fact, all the major “Hollywood” studios produced at least a portion of their short film releases in the East during the first years of sound. This routine was seriously disrupted in December 1929 when a fire gutted Pathé’s Manhattan studio, killing 11 cast and crew members during production of a 2-reel musical. In the ensuing crackdown several New York studios were temporarily closed by fire inspectors, and the Gramercy studio never reopened. The immediate beneficiaries were the handful of small rental studios in New Jersey that had been trying, without much success, to attract independent producers. RKO shifted most of its local production to the Ideal studio in Hudson Heights, which had been wired for sound in 1928 (Herbert Brenon had used this studio as his headquarters from 1916 to 1918, but few filmmakers had worked there in the interim).
Fields had been performing his famous golf sketch at the Palace (his last appearance in vaudeville) just before filming this canned version at Ideal in late April 1930. RKO used the same technical staff for these films that it employed at the Gramercy studio, but was apparently unsatisfied with the Ideal facilities; after 5 months in New Jersey, it decided to centralize all production in California.
Unlike the Clark & McCullough series, The Golf Specialist was a stand-alone project which can best be understood as an elaborate screen test for its star, W.C. Fields. His very first line of dialogue, “Any telegrams? Cablegrams? Radios? Televisions?” muttered in his trademark drawl, immediately marks him as one of those vaudevillians, like Will Rogers, whose success in talkies would surpass anything they had achieved in silent pictures. (The reference to television was unusually topical, as several experimental stations were already on the air in New York and New Jersey when this film was shot.)
The Golf Specialist not only presents the best surviving record of a Fields stage routine, but also captures his extraordinarily dark comic persona at its most extreme. There is no trace of the sentimentalizing, seen in both the silent and sound features, which would be added by his handlers to make this character more appealing to a wider public. Just as Erich von Stroheim had challenged audiences by making his protagonist a villain, Fields created this comic version of “the man you love to hate”, a cheat and a coward who hates dogs and robs small children of their pennies. RKO had no further use for Fields or his character, but his film career would flourish once William Le Baron returned to Paramount. Le Baron and Fields would then remake many of their silent features, polishing and perfecting the character of the domesticated householder worn down by home and family. The old routines, and the old character, would be relegated to the background. But before that happened, The Golf Specialist would give audiences one last look at the uncensored version. – Richard Koszarski
