“You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man” screens at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, June 7, 2014 in the Durwood Film Vault of the Kansas City Central Library, 14W. 10th St. Admission is free. It’s part of the year-long film series Hollywood’s Greatest Year, featuring movies released in 1939.
W.C. Fields didn’t make movies so much as he made extended comedy routines strung together on the flimsiest of narrative threads.
He was a product of vaudeville, after all, not the repertory theater. He was only any good at playing one character: himself, a cranky, often hen-pecked misanthrope and con artist who looked more like a cartoon than a real human being.
Fields’ hair was thinning, his red nose bulbous (in real life as in his films, he was a prodigious consumer of alcohol), his body pear-shaped, his legs skinny. He often wore an out-of-fashion top hat or straw boater, long-tailed coats, and spats.
Yet despite his ridiculous physique, his training as a variety hall juggler allowed him to move with remarkable grace and made him a natural for physical comedy.
(Check out his 1932 short The Dentist on YouTube…the bit where he tries to pull a female patient’s tooth suggests that beneath his pudgy form there lurked considerable strength.)
Especially there was Fields’ voice, a snide snarl that remains immediately identifiable more than 70 years after his death.
Butler's Cinema Scene 