W.C. Fields: His Movies are Much Funnier Than the Book

W. C. Fields has been my favorite comedian since I was a kid. I recently purchased two boxed sets of his movies and throughly enjoyed rediscovering this American icon of the stage and screen.

While thumbing through the biography section at my local library, I stumbled upon a relatively new biography of Fields that claims to set the record straight on many of the myths about this great comic.

Man on the Flying Trapeze by Simon Louvish is a thoroughly researched book . Yet, not only is it surprisingly dull but also is one of the most sloppily written biographies I’ve read. Cities like Cincinnati are continually misspelled throughout the book and Fields’ name is butchered more than once. When I see this many typos in print, I begin to wonder if the author got the facts right, too.

Louvish spends most of the book focusing on Fields’ early days on the vaudeville circuit, where he honed his skills as a juggler and comedian. I was surprised to learn of his dislike for illusionist Harry Houdini and his fondness for actor and humorist Will Rogers, but ultimately, I never felt like I got to know the man himself. We learn about his failed marriage  yet we never really understand the causes or why he ignored his wife and children (both legitimate and illegitimate) throughout his life. The author paints Fields as a self-centered lout who had some strange notions life and continually tries to give you the ”story behind the story.”  Unfortunately, I often found the “real story” a lot less engaging than the “facts” I thought I knew.

Fortunately, for hardcore fans, the book contains plenty of snippets of dialog from his movie and stage scripts to make you laugh out loud. I would have preferred to see more emphasis on his movie classics. For a decade beginning in the early 1930s, Fields released a string of movies that still hold up, beginning with You’re Telling Me, You Can’t Cheat and Honest Man, It’s a Gift, Poppy and  Man on the Flying Trapeze , and his biggest successes, My Little Chickadee and The Bank Dick.

Rather than spend your time trying to get to know William Claude Dukenfield through these dreary 480+ pages, I suggest simply watching his movies to experience the genius of this funny, funny man. Here are five video snippets to get you started:

• Fields kicks Baby LeRoy in “The Old Fashioned Way” ,
• Teaching the boys to smoke in “The Bank Dick“,
• Serving jail time in “Man on the Flying Trapeze“,
• The famous car wreck segments 1 and 2 from “If I Had a Million”, and
• Trying to sleep in “It’s a Gift“

My take … in the case of W. C. Fields, his art is definitely more amusing than his life.