I See Fields of Dream

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MJ asked that I review The Best of WC Fields. Considering that it was the one I wanted to see least - including the option I forgot, The X-Files: I Want to Believe - I'm treating it as a history homework assignment.

There's three films coming in total to less than an hour and, well....

The Golf Specialist

A manipulative cheating wife goes golfing with a rich-looking older man (Fields), while her thuggish and (justifiably) suspicious husband looks for her. You can predict the rest of the plot already can't you?



Except that isn't what happens. Instead, we get fifteen minutes of Fields trying to play a shot, while his dimwitted caddy persistently distracts him with increasingly surreal noises.



Then the police arrive and arrest the golfer. The End.



Oh, other things do happen. A manipulative little girl with a voice like an air raid siren with adenoids fails to get 'charity' money out of him. The hotel desk clerk is probably gay, and there's a rolling contortionist.



But none of it amounts to a story - just a loose bundle of set-piece jokes. Which is...fine. I liked the police's list of crimes:




The Dentist

This is a sketch set in a dentist's practice, right? An incompetent dentist gets high on his own laughing gas, or a patient tries to do the surgery himself while the dentist's back is turned, or there's a stream of bizarre patients.

Um, no. Because this is a golf-playing dentist, and when he's not doing it, he's talking about it at work. There may be a theme to this 'best of' collection.

Eventually, a woman with toothache arrives at the surgery.

We get the obligatory racist joke - "I don't believe in doctors. The doctor down the street treated a man for nine years for yellow jaundice, then found out he was a Jap." - followed immediately by one which, anachronism aside, has a surprisingly modern form:

Dentist: Can I use gas?
Patient: Well, gas or electric lights.



A man in the waiting room overhears the woman's cries of nervousness, plus an industrial drill outside, puts two and two together, and decides he doesn't need treatment that badly.

Fields drills a second woman's tooth with sawing, grinding, howling sound effects...and is interrupted by his daughter who wants to marry. He locks her in an upstairs room, and her angry stamping on the floor makes the surgery ceiling start to fall in.

Fields asks his patient "Have you ever had this tooth pulled before?", and proceeds to pull...and pull.







A man with a beard provides the challenge of locating his mouth...then we rush outside and we get a rather sudden romantic ending.





The Pharmacist

Fields won't let his daughter eat at the table because she chews gum...so she eats the canary and coughs up feathers. Oh...kay.

A customer shows how some political categories haven't changed:

Fields: Can I interest you in a stamp?
Customer: Yeah gimme a stamp.
Fields fumbles with the stamps.
Customer: No, give me a purple one.
Fields: I'm sorry we don't have any purple ones. I could paint one for you?
Customer: I don't want a painted one. A person hasn't got any rights in this country any more. The government even tells you what colour stamps you've got to buy. That's the Democratic party for you.
Fields: I've written to Washington about it?
Customer: What do you want to write to Washington for? he's dead.

The customer buys a single stamp and wants to pay with a hundred dollar bill. He gets the stamp on credit...and a free ming vase with every purchase.



The mob and the police start shooting at each other, and hiding under the counter as his stock is destroyed by bullets, Fields takes a phone call complaint about the late delivery of some cough drops. The End.







I think WC Fields works best if you treat him as the nominal protagonist of a feverish dream. Just let it wash over you. You could try watching his films while stoned - it won't make them seem like there's a coherent plot, but it won't matter that there isn't.

Most of the jokes are based on repetition and/or people misunderstanding what's going on. Just occasionally, it even made me laugh.

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