It's a Gift (1934)

It's a Gift (1934) was the first W.C. Fields film I saw, and is probably his most accessible one; it's also my favorite film of his, and the one I consider his best. In it Fields plays Harold Bissinett (one of a series of funny names for Fields' characters), a middle-aged grocer who buys an orange grove in California after his deceased uncle leaves him an inheritance. However, this being a W.C. Fields film, the plot is only a loose framework for a series of comic routines.

The funniest one (and one of the funniest scenes in any of Fields' films) involves Fields having to simultaneously deal with an irate customer screaming about an order of cumquats and a clumsy, blundering blind man who inadvertently smashes his merchandise. The scene of said blind man managing to cross a busy street without getting hit by sheer dumb luck is one of the great loopy, surreal gags in a Fields film.

Another highlight of the film is the scene of Fields trying to sleep on his front porch despite a variety of annoyances and distractions conspiring to keep him awake. (This basic premise was later used by Chuck Jones in his Three Bears cartoon "What's Brewin', Bruin?" [1948].) These include the clinking of a milkman's bottles, a coconut bouncing down the steps, an obnoxious insurance salesman, and Baby LeRoy dropping grapes on him.

Fields' persona is known for being a drunken, surly misanthrope, a man who hates children, animals, and most of the people around him. There are two basic variations on that persona: the scheming con man (seen in "The Golf Specialist" [1930] and You Can't Cheat an Honest Man [1939]), and the beleaguered family man (seen in this film and The Man in the Flying Trapeze [1935]). Fields' character in this film doesn't have the harsh edges of his ones in "The Dentist" (1932) or The Bank Dick (1940), although he's not exactly sunshine and roses: when his wife forces him to split a sandwich with his son, he folds the meat into half and gives his son the half without any.

This film features many of the prototypical elements of Fields' films: the nagging, overbearing wife, the teenage daughter and her boyfriend. A key element of the film's comedy is Fields' frustration: he can hardly take a puff of a cigar or a swig of whiskey behind his wife's back, his customers yell at him, and he even has trouble getting some sleep. He responds to these annoyances with sarcastic remarks and mutterings under his breath, something Fields characters are always wont to do.

When Fields arrives in California and finds his orange grove, he's met with a worthless tract of weed-strewn land and a dilapidated shack not even the Joads would find fit to live in. However, he soon finds out that a land developer wants it for a grandstand adjoining a racetrack and drives a hard bargain to get the most he can for it. Fields' negotiations with the developer lead to one of the great exchanges in his films. "You're drunk," he says. "Yeah, and you're crazy," Fields responds. "But I'll be sober in the morning, and you'll be crazy for the rest of your life."

"Towed in a Hole" (1932)

"Towed in a Hole" (1932) is one of Laurel and Hardy's greatest films, and is a great demonstration of the delights of their sound shorts. In it Stan and Ollie are fish peddlers, and Stan gets the bright idea of eliminating the middleman by catching their fish themselves. For this purpose they buy an old fishing boat in order to repair it, but since they're unable to properly perform the simplest tasks (including but not limited to installing a radio antenna and carrying a piano up a flight of concrete stairs), it goes about as well as one would expect.

Being a Laurel and Hardy film it of course has the expected (and wonderful) slapstick, but one element it has that most of their sound films don't is tit-for-tat games of one-upsmanship, which were mostly phased out after their transition to sound. (Some of the films they appear in include "Two Tars" [1928] and "Big Business" [1929].) Moreover, they involves Laurel and Hardy fighting with each other rather than an outsider. Accidental mishaps erupt into an all-out retaliatory war, with the two of them pouring buckets of water down each others' pants and spraying each others' rear ends with hoses. Eventually Hardy says, "Isn't this silly? Here we are, two grown men, acting like a couple of children"- which sums up a lot of Laurel and Hardy's behavior in general.

It also includes a lot of the other elements that make their films great. It includes some of Stan Laurel's trademark surreal gags, like a hose writhing like a serpent. It also displays Oliver Hardy's penchant for looking at the camera and giving the viewer a plaintive, "Why me?" look after suffering from some misfortune or mishap.

"The Dentist" (1932)

Although he's one of the great screen comics, I've found W.C. Fields to be more of an acquired taste than Laurel and Hardy or the Marx Brothers. It's not that he's any less funny than Stan Laurel or Groucho Marx, or that I didn't think his films were hilarious when I first saw them: rather, it's that it took a few films for me to gain a full understanding of and appreciation for his comedy that made it feel richer and more enjoyable. Fields' comedy style is very different from the more straightforward one of Laurel and Hardy: his comedy thrives more on the surreal and absurd, and his films are more cinematically unrefined. Said films have a loose, freewheeling quality, in which the story is a loose framework for a series of gags and routines rather than something that holds the film together. Fields' persona is also less likeable and sympathetic than those of most comedians, even the anarchic, freewheeling Marx Brothers.

The unique qualities of Fields' films are even more pronounced in the two-reel shorts he made during the early '30's, and they're also more willing to defy cinematic norms and subvert audience expectations: indeed some of them, like "The Fatal Glass of Beer" (1933), come across as deliberate exercises in messing with the audience. "The Dentist" (1932), the second of these films, is Fields' wildest and most freewheeling film prior to Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), as well as one of his flat-out funniest.

The subversive nature of the film starts with its opening scenes. We see Fields being served breakfast by a woman who reminds him where his newspaper and reading glasses are, and are naturally led to assume it's his wife. This seems to be confirmed when he smacks her on the ass, only for us to learn that she's in fact his daughter. This is part of a vein of dirty and risque humor throughout the film: characters make a number of comments that can be read as sexually suggestive (one patient tells Fields that she doesn't want him to "fool around with me in the dark"), and when he pulls the tooth of another (female) patient she wraps her legs around him in a way that's very risque. (In fact, the scene was so risque that it had to be excised from the film during its re-release following the implementation of the Production Code.)

Fields' persona is known for being one that isn't particularly warm and cuddly. He's typically a drunken, surly misanthrope, a man who hates children, animals, and most of the people around him. Even in his gentler incarnations he's the kind of man who, forced to split a sandwich with his son, gives him the half without any meat. In this film Field's persona is aggressively unlikeable, the kind of man whose brazen contempt for the world around him makes for comedy gold. (In fact, he's so unlikeable that after this film Fields decided to tone it down a notch.) While playing golf, he conks a man on the head with his ball and throws his caddy in a lake after he misses a shot. He displays open contempt for his patients: when he hears a woman moaning in pain in the lobby, he says, "Oh, the hell with her." While trying to make his shot he forces his caddy to move back and forth from one spot to another. When the poor clod responds to one of these tongue-lashings by responding that he's only standing where he told him to stand, Fields replies, "Never mind where I told you to stand, you stand where I tell you!"

Fields' loopy, surreal humor is one of the fixtures of his work, and in this film it's on hyperdrive. For starters, Fields runs his dental practice out of his house, thereby saving him the trouble of having to build a separate office. When Fields locks his daughter in the upstairs bedroom to keep her from running off with the iceman she stomps on the floor so hard that pieces of the ceiling fall off, and of them falls in a patient's mouth. When Fields uses a buzzsaw on another patient's mouth birds fly out of his large, bushy beard, and Fields picks up his shotgun and begins shooting at them.

"The Dentist" is Fields at his most extreme: it's even more loopy and  freewheeling than his typical work, and eschews such niceties as narrative coherence. (What can you say about a film called "The Dentist" in which most of the first half is spent on a golf game?) The real draw in a Fields him is Fields himself: his persona, his style and sensibility, his humor, his surreal loopiness, his sardonic persona and mumbled asides. This is one of the films that presents Fields at his most Fieldsian, and as such is a great display of a truly unique comic mind.