A Fatal Glass of Fields
Today’s best comedians—Eddie Murphy, Danny McBride, Larry the Cable Guy, Seth Rogen, Will Farrell and Steve Carell—can still learn from W.C. Fields, subject of an always welcome retrospective tribute at Film Forum. Fields’ familiar, ever-funny It’s a Gift, The Bank Dick, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man and You’re Telling Me are on view. Their titles alone tell you how genuinely they represent the American way of life. But at this Borat-Arthur in movie humor, they’re worth appreciating for how they point the way toward a perfect balance of sensibility, vision and execution.
Even Fields’ 1933 short "The Fatal Glass of Beer" (showing April 25) ranks with those classic features. A phenomenal example of Fields’ vision, it’s a vaudevillian caprice that to this day is also an avantgarde tour de force. It starts generically, as an American pioneer fable, satirizing D.W. Griffith, Jack London and—most audaciously—Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. But Fields explodes those Americana forerunners: Their sentiments are rattled the way contemporary comedians try to do, but Fields also goes for undermining the conventions.
Despite the snowy wilderness setting of pioneer fortitude, Fields and director Clyde Bruckman (Buster Keaton’s The General) take the form of tall tales and proverbial folk songs, then warn about modern—
urban—realities. (Its unforgettable family wisdom includes, "My Uncle Ichabod said, speaking of the city: ‘It ain’t no place for women, gal. But pretty men go there.’") Evoking the Prohibition Era, the film teases corruption, temptation and moralizing. Fields and Bruckman don’t just settle for jokes. Simon Louvish, author of Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W.C. Fields, noted "This is the first instance in film of Fields’ abiding love for the puritanical temperance sermons of his youth, the delicious lampooning of his own era’s Prohibitionists in the hackneyed argot of the 19th century."
A prime example of the artist as auteur, Fields’ movies were directed by others but they authentically illustrate his precise perceptions about human behavior, social folly and cosmic punishment—none better than when "The Fatal Glass of Beer" sends up both the language of Prohibition and of cinema itself. French Surrealists had nothing on Fields’ structurally inebriated—yet sober-minded—vision. In 1992, George Plimpton enthused, "I have never recovered from the first time I saw ‘The Fatal Glass.’ It represents for me still the high point of cinema, surpassing even Groucho’s Duck Soup." Gilles Deleuze rated it "a short masterpiece" and Bob Dylan quoted its folk song in "Lonesome Day Blues." Recently, only the best parts of Eddie Murphy’s Meet Dave have been nearly as fearless.
The mix of realism and surrealism (a rear-projected nature doc of deer and sled dogs is far better, weirder than CGI) gives "The Fatal Glass of Beer" modernity, but the short has lasted because Fields put personal truth on screen: the short-fuse skepticism of the American male—done definitively for urban, rural, young, old and all ethnicities, which makes Fields universal where today’s comics are often limited to their cultural specificity. (Until Sacha Baron Cohen learns this trick, he’ll always be limited to obnoxious, polarizing shtick.) It is Fields’ authentically frustrated sensibility—pissed-off by others’ selfishness, ineptitude and lassitude— that makes him archetypal: everyone’s unmuzzled self, but also everyone’s dad. It’s funny when the world doesn’t work his way because it mirrors dissatisfaction we know personally. "The Fatal Glass of Beer" also deals with a disappointing father-son relationship—a paradigm of American heritage. (In its "Goodnight, Chester" routine, family niceties and theatrical form both become existential obstacles, part of an epic to be endured and persevered.)
Scholar Judy Cornes’ Alcohol in the Movies, 1898-1962 surmised, "I suspect that ‘The Fatal Glass of Beer’ is a film more in tune with the 21st century than it was on its first appearance in the early 20th century." Yes, it surpasses most contemporary comedies—even stoner japes like Pineapple Express—because Fields refuses to be a political mascot of the Tina Fey/Jon Stewart/Bill Maher variety. Better than politically incorrect, "The Fatal Glass of Beer" is an antisentimental masterpiece.
>>W.C. Fields
Directed by Clyde Bruckman
At Film Forum
April 22-May 3