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W. C. Fields
a low opinion of humanity. Fields' early grapples with things like hunger, frost, bartenders and police gave him a vast, watchful suspicion of society and its patterns. This feeling shaped his art. When, in The Bank Dick, he started uneasily upon seeing a teller in a straw hat, he was only harking back to his youth. Fields' first bank account was opened after a brief conversation with the president, who happened to be wearing a hat at his desk. The hat worried Fields for years ; he kept checking back to see if the president was still on the job and the books intact.
Fields' last motion picture, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, which he wrote under his pen name of Otis Criblecoblis, was in some measure illustrative of his outlook. "His main purpose," said one of the studio officials, "seemed to be to break as many rules as possible and cause the maximum amount of trouble for everybody." A brief synopsis of the plot, which Fields first composed on the back of a grocery bill and for which he successfully demanded that the studio (Universal) pay him $25,000 follows :
In the opening scene, Fields, as himself, is outlining an original story to a producer, in the presence of the ingenue and the leading man. After he explains that the action begins in a pool hall, with the ingenue wearing a false beard, they somehow appear to lose interest, and Fields wanders out to pick up his small niece, whom he has parked, for safety, in a shooting gallery. En route he stops to watch a group of disgusted urchins throw mudballs at a billboard advertising one of his movies. He exclaims, "Godfrey Daniel!" (which was as near as he could ever manage to "goddamn" and still get by the Hays office) and proceeds. Shortly thereafter his niece's mother, Madame Gorgeous, a circus performer, falls off a trapeze and is killed. Fields and his niece then leave by airplane for Mexico City, where he plans to sell wooden nutmegs to members of the Russian colony. On the way, he