Three of a Kind

Abstract

The chapter deals with three films. As Augustus Q. Winterbottom in Tillie and Gus, Fields returns to portray a roguish character. Doubtful about Fields’s ability to carry a picture alone, Paramount teamed him again with Alison Skipworth, his cohort in If I Had a Million. She plays Tillie Winterbottom, his divorced wife and a mi schief-maker, who has just lost her saloon, in a rigged dice game in China. Each receive letters from the larcenous lawyer Phineas Pratt, stating that Tillie’s brother has died. Both decide to travel to Danville, a river town, in order to secure their share of the inheritance. Once in Danville, Gus becomes a benevolent trickster by helping Tillie’s niece and nephew, Mary and Tom Sheridan, win their rightful inheritance from infamous Phineas Pratt, the estate’s executor, who has cheated them by stealing the estate’s funds. Alice in Wonderland is his second film, playing Humpty Dumpty. Molding the Humpty Dumpty plaster cast on Fields’s body, head, and hands became one of the worst ordeals the comedian faced in his screen career. Frank Westmore, famous makeup artist, witnessed the torment Bill endured. His hands, which he cherished since his juggling years, were another problem. Once the plaster covered his hands, Fields leaped from his chair and smacked them on the walls, attempting to remove the plaster from his fingers. “The face mold was a crumbling mess around his still-shouting mouth, and his hands began to bleed.” A doctor was called to calm Fields, who now had become completely daffy. The physician grabbed a syringe with a needle and injected the comedian with a sedative. “Wally eventually molded Fields’s face into two vertical halves, alternately leaving one eye and one nostril uncovered by the plaster.”Fortunately, the shoot took only a few hours. Following the script, he turned Humpty Dumpty into a cranky, gruff, and sarcastic oddity, pronouncing each Lewis Carroll line as if it had been written for himself. Fields’s cameo role as Humpty Dumpty got mostly good reviews, pleasing the Paramount brass. His third film, Six of a Kind, also failed to give him top billing. The comedy featured three stellar pairs of comedians who together comprise six of a kind—Fields and Alison Skipworth; the radio stars, George Burns and Gracie Allen; and the stage celebrities, Charlie Ruggles and Mary Boland. Adding to Bill’s displeasure was that the draft script he read the night before the shooting had him enter late in the film, thus allowing Burns and Allen to steal the picture. Assigned to the film was the famous director Leo McCarey. On the Paramount lot Fields told McCarey that he had drunk a “quart of whiskey before he finally got to his part! I came to the conclusion that you were trying to kill me in pictures. I thought we were good friends but Cesar thought Brutus was too.” His free-wheeling attitude infuriated McCarey and they constantly argued during the shoot. McCarey believed that the best way to direct Fields was “by getting into [comic] fights with him.” Looking back, McCarey recalled that he got along with Fields “after a fashion.” I directed him “by getting into fights with him.” Bill’s difficulty “was all based on his drinking.” During the shoot, a truce was finally orchestrated that mostly permitted Bill to freely ad-lib within reason. Fields cleverly turned his role as “Honest” John Hoxley, the sheriff of Nuggetville, Nevada, into one of his most familiar personas—a mendacious liquor-loving rogue, who even steals coins from a pay phone. He plays opposite the gruff Alison Skipworth, called Duchess, who operates a shabby inn in Nuggetville. Although Fields’s antics as a sheriff are amusing, the highlight is his pool playing scene, which partly resembles his vaudeville sketch. To do the routine, the comedian sent for his table, which was in storage in New York. Appearing with him in the sequence was Tammany Young, a new member of Fields’s stock company of character actor, who plays Doctor Busby. Young asks the sheriff how he got “the name of Honest John.” The question gives Fields the opportunity to relate a tall tale. During his career in film and radio he became well known for spinning far-fetched humorous stories that followed the nineteenth-century literary tradition of picturesque comic exaggeration found in the tall talk of boastful backwoodsmen and the adventurous yarns of frontiersmen. Using his instinctive talent for timing and delivery, Fields intersperses pieces of his yarn throughout his entire pool routine. The pool scene also displays Fields’s wonderful pantomime skills as he pursues his fruitless and frustrating fight against the objects he handles during his pool games. Everything he touches goes haywire; every object rebuffs his efforts. He hits the cue ball but misses the target causing it to rebound off the cushion, and bang him in the head. Recovering from the blow, the sheriff places his stick above the cue ball and tries a massé shot. When he misses the ball, his cue pierces the table, a sight gag he performed in vaudeville. He yanks the cue out of the table. Repeating himself, Fields takes the best parts of his pool stage sketch, uses his pantomime skills to great effect, and adds humorous dialogue. The end result is that the sequence blossoms on the screen. Fields’s performance was hailed by the critics. As a co-star in his last four features, Bill had managed to steal the pictures and to garner top-notch reviews. But he knew that he needed to get sole star billing in order to really reach the zenith of his calling. After his successes in his last three films, he was still haunted by that perennial question: When would the Paramount brass recognize his talent to be the star of a film?