The henpecked hustler.

• Author: Gehring, Wes D.
• Position: W.C. Fields - Biography

THE COMIC ASIDES AND DOUBLE-TAKES of W.C. Fields always were a welcomed fifth-column attack on the pestilence of day-to-day living during the Depression years. His entertaining cynicism seems even more pertinent today. In fascinating fashion, Fields vacillated between two screen personas--the huckster and henpecked husband.

Fields' trickster is in the literary tradition of the late 19th century, America's golden age of the confidence man. Like the classic pioneering diddlers who put a creative spin on Yankee ingenuity, the Fields manipulator kept on the move. The London Times said of his 1936 "Poppy" characterization: "Like all great showmen, he knows ... the moment when the prudent man stops talking and makes hurriedly for open country--preferably on his accuser's horse." Movement protected his sneaky character from the law, creditors, and suckers who had wised up to the comedian's imaginative gambling skills. Being forever on the road offered opportunity as well as escape. As humorist Johnson J. Hooper has his notable huckster Simon Suggs observe, "It is good to be shifty in a new country." Like Suggs' old Southwest diddler. Fields' con artist engaged in small-time operations that did little, if any, harm.

In comic contrast, Fields' antihero plays the most entertaining of contemporary victims, a browbeaten family man anchored to a going-nowhere position in small-town America--though his best showcase of this world, "It's a Gift" (1934), eventually offers an 11th-hour reprieve to a California paradise. (The turnaround is so extreme, even for a comedy, that one might best "read" it as a satire of happy endings.) While Fields is inspired in either comedic mode--huckster or antihero--his henpecked husband occasionally lets a bit of larceny come through. For instance, when his screen wife in "Gift" forces him to share a sandwich with their brat of a son, the comedian bends the meat onto his side before dividing the bread.

Ironically, the same year "Gift" opened, Fields made what is arguably the comedian's best huckster picture, "The Old-Fashioned Way." From its opening moments, "Way" is a case study of any-con-for-the-production. The movie begins with a sheriff at the train depot about to serve Fields' showman, "The Great McGonigle," with a legal writ to keep him and his theatre troupe in town because of unpaid bills. Yet, McGonigle manages to come up behind the sheriff and wastes no time in setting fire to the document, which the officer is...