Godfrey Daniel!! No W.C. Fields thread?

I was gonna title this Fields vs Ozu, but anyway... "Chickens" is one of my fave movie songs (see below).

New DVDs
By DAVE KEHR

W. C. FIELDS COMEDY
Collection: Volume 2


Here’s a notion to kick around: W. C. Fields is America’s answer to Yasujiro Ozu.

Fields, the star of “The Bank Dick,” and Ozu, the Japanese director of “Tokyo Story,” share more than just a famous enthusiasm for strong drink. Though their films take place on opposite sides of the world, their settings are remarkably similar. Fields and Ozu are two of the cinema’s great chroniclers of the lower middle class. Their typical heroes are office workers or minor functionaries who struggle quietly to hang on to their jobs or small businesses, share cramped homes with multigenerational families and must endure the endless demands of domineering wives (Fields) or interfering siblings (Ozu).

Most revealingly, there is their recurring theme of the widower (Chishu Ryu in Ozu’s films), devoted to raising a lovely, lonely daughter, the only member of the family who loves and respects him. The dramatic fulcrum often rests on the question of whether and how to step aside, liberating the dutiful daughter to pursue her own happiness.

There are five movies in Universal’s new box set “W. C. Fields Comedy Collection: Volume 2,” drawn from his Paramount and Universal periods. Like Universal’s first collection, the new one mixes major and minor films. Studio executives seemed to find Fields’s misanthropy more palatable when it was placed in a historical context, as in “The Old Fashioned Way” (directed by William Beaudine, 1934) and “Poppy” (A. Edward Sutherland, 1936), both included here.

But Fields seems more engaged, his wit more pointed and pertinent, in his studies of contemporary American unhappiness: here, the wonderful “You’re Telling Me!” (by Erle C. Kenton, a 1934 remake of Fields’s silent “So’s Your Old Man,” directed by Gregory La Cava) and “Man on the Flying Trapeze” (Clyde Bruckman, 1935), a harrowing portrait of marital hell.

These films (again like Ozu’s) are marked by a quiet sense of disappointment whose exact nature is never spelled out: Life has simply let these men down, allowing them a single glimpse of happiness (the marriages that produced those radiant, devoted daughters), followed by decades of struggle, as Fields’s characters remarry in desperate and doomed attempts to provide their daughters with respectable upbringings.

The new Fields box finishes with “Never Give a Sucker an Even Break” (1941), his last major film and perhaps his most self-lacerating. The plot casts Fields as himself, a comedy star whose latest effort, “The Bank Dick,” is derided by a couple of street kids as “a bupke” as he looks on. Fields is rapidly failing at his studio, Esoteric Pictures, and reports with trepidation to read his new script to the studio boss, played by (and named) Franklin Pangborn.

The script is a ridiculous mess, describing Fields’s Swiftian journey to an uncharted island populated by Russian refugees and ruled by the mother of all frightening Fields dowagers, Margaret Dumont (on loan from the Marx Brothers and made up with a hideous unibrow). Fields and his director, Edward F. Cline, seem to be trying to revive the slapstick surrealism of the unbridled Paramount comedies of the early ’30s, like “International House” and “Million Dollar Legs,” both starring Fields. (“Legs” was directed by Mr. Cline.)

But Fields, approaching the end of his life, looks ravaged, and the long sequences of old-fashioned slapstick are undermined by his fragility. The picture shuts down for minutes at a time as the ingénue Gloria Jean (not the loving daughter this time, but a loving niece) performs light classical arias.

But for all its failings, “Never Give a Sucker an Even Break” has an appealingly inward, mournful quality, as if it were a swan song that only its singer could hear. Unconcerned with reaching the audience, Fields seems to be muttering to himself through much of the movie, his barely audible remarks often achieving a strange poetry. And certainly Ozu would have appreciated the Zen qualities of the lyric Fields wheezily recites to his niece:

The chickens lay eggs in Kansas.
The chickens have pretty legs in Kansas.
And this is not a joke,
One rolled me for my poke.
The chickens have pretty legs in Kansas.


(Universal Studios Home Entertainment, $59.98, not rated)



Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company