W. C. Fields : his follies and fortunes (1949)

$5000 cash for the car, he refused to pay a cent for repairs. He took the stand that the garage was liable until he got the automobile home. Before he left the second time, the garage people insisted on teaching him how to drive. "Bill developed into a wonderful driver," Grady says. "He had, of course, natural co-ordination, and he was strong and athletic besides. He drove fast, took chances, and got into frequent arguments. During my fourteen years as his agent, I never knew him to be wrong. If he went around a curve, jumped up on a parkway and ran into a man's front porch, he'd find some reason why the house shouldn't have been there." It was not hard for Fields to take on persecution complexes, and he managed a neat one about road hogs. Within six months after he bought the Cadillac he was convinced that 90 per cent of the people driving other cars were after his particular scalp. He rolled down the highway with a malevolent eye fixed on the opposite lane, ready to lock horns at the slightest hostile move. This bias, like most of his personal feelings, seeped into his work. In the movie // / Had a Million he worked out a sketch which represented one of his dreams of long standing. The plot directed that a number of persons, including Charles Laughton, Fields, Charles Ruggles, and George Raft, be capriciously given a million dollars by an elderly, cynical millionaire, who then studied the use each recipient made of the money. Most of the actors were content to abide by the ideas of the script writers; Fields conceived his own distribution of the windfall. Laughton, an obscure clerk for a corporation, walked humbly through several anterooms, to deliver a long pent-up Bronx cheer to his boss; Raft found himself in a position, as a hunted man, in which he couldn't cash his check without being caught ; and Ruggles, in an immensely satisfying scene, smashed all the fragile wares in a high-class china shop where he'd worked for twenty-odd years, 161