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There is some confusion about hats, but not about common goals.
threats against his enemies, most of whom — and this is the cream of the Fieldsian jest — were scarcely aware of his bulbous existence. If only they would pay heed to him, even as they flattened him, he might have been able to bear his fate. Alas, their eyes were on the stars and his were fixed firmly on the petty discomforts of existence.
Fields had to wait for a means to be found to reproduce that inimitable voice of his and so, although a stage star of great repute he did not come to movies until they began to talk. Happily, that coincided with the opening of a great rent in the American dream. At last the world was ready to hear his peculiar version of the frustrations, anxieties, nightmares, crotchets and desperations of those members of the lower orders who insisted on having big-time (or Republican) beliefs on small-time, small town (or Democratic) budgets.
Because of the lamentable gap between his dreams and his reality, Fields was possessed of an abiding, simmering anger which, since he was powerless to vent it on his true tormentors, he turned against small children, cripples, idiots and others so low in life as to be beneath his paltry station. Toward his legion of superiors he turned' a face that was both anxiously obsequious and incurably sly. Even as he smiled his false smile and rubbed together his hammy hands,
he was, you could see, planning some small meanness, some sad confidence trick which he knew to be insignificant as protest but which he felt compelled to place on the record.
All of this sprang from the depths of Fields' own being. His childhood, like that of so many great comics, was one of almost unbearable hardship, and he himself suffered the slings of the mighty and the petty wretchednesses of their small-minded fellow-travelers, the cops, clerks and cretins who plague all whose dreams exceed their purses and their powers. He passed his life, even at the height of his fame, in constant warfare with them.
Like the Marx Brothers, Fields never once attempted to enlist our sympathy. He remained a cruel comedian, undoubtedly sensing that, as his excellent biographer, Robert Lewis Taylor, notes, "Most people harbor a secret affection, for anyone with a low opinion of humanity." A man's man and a man's comedian, his style owed much to the atmosphere of the barrooms and pool halls, which were the natural habitat — and last refuge — of the marginal man he portrayed. As they have disappeared from the land, so has appreciation for the humor of W. C. Fields, who in a glorious final outburst of the American screen comedian's art, held a wickedly distorting mirror up to a comically dreadful aspect of life.
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