Spitball Army

My exposure to W.C. Fields was limited to the multiple viewings of Never Give a Sucker an Even Break that I enjoyed when I was a kid.  That ridiculous, episodic and barely comprehensible film was on TV all of the time then, and is still one of my favorite comedies, even though I couldn’t tell you much about it that would make sense.  Let’s see, there were two women living on top of a mountain with a gorilla, a rude waitress, a game of squigilum, and the caustic term of endearment “blimpie-pie.”

My W.C. Fields deficit was relieved slightly today, after I watched his hilarious 20-minute short, The Fatal Glass of Beer.  The notes on the DVD package describe the film as a spoof of Yukon melodramas (as if anyone younger than your grandparents knows what those are).  On my first viewing, I had no idea what was going on – the opening scene has Fields, in a miserably cold prospector’s shack, singing a song to a fellow miner while accompanying himself on an autoharp, while wearing mittens – so I watched it again.

During the next viewing I was still scratching my head over some of the dated humor, and wondered if the poor sound quality might have been obscuring some of the punchlines.  I laughed anyway.  Even during the brief sequence where Fields discovers two Indians squatting inside his cabin.  No doubt, this scene would be labelled as politically incorrect today.  But I laughed anyway.  And how.

One of the many recurring gags in this short is Fields getting a handful of snow thrown in his face every time he opens his cabin door and states, “It ain’t a fit night out for man or beast!”  This kind of silliness always gets a chortle out of me.  He also has a three-foot long piece of bread that he busily dunks in his soup bowl through half of the film, but never takes a bite from.  Watching the frustration on Fields’ face each time he raises the soggy bread to his lips, only to get yet another interruption – nobody does that slow burn so well.  And a 30-second series of “good nights” between Fields, his wife, and son Chester, could have been a model for the closing  moments of an episode of The Waltons (except that, here, it is hysterical).

Once the city gets into a bohoy’s syhystem, he loses his ahankering for the cohuntry.

I think I’ve watched this little movie four times now, and I am struck by how richly entertaining it is without the aid of color, special effects, or any visible budget – I reckon, guess and calculate that it’s all in the intentionally hammy overacting and the inspired wordplay.

I went to the movie theater on New Year’s Day to see Juno, and before the film started, we were subjected to 30 minutes of commercials and previews.  If I had seen something like this instead – in the same way that serials and newsreels were shown before a film in the early part of the last century [that makes it sound like a really long time ago, doesn’t it?!] – then I know that I would have enjoyed the feature even more.