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

Page scan 000351 from W. C. Fields : his follies and fortunes

Record Details:

Title:
W. C. Fields : his follies and fortunes
Date:
1949
Publisher:
Garden City, NY : Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Volume:
W. C. Fields : his follies and fortunes
Leaf #:
000351
Language:
English
Subjects:
Motion Pictures, Motion pictures--Biography
Collection:
Books
Format:
Books
Contributor:
Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum
Sponsor:
Media History Digital Library
Coordinator:
Media History Digital Library
Description:
Date Added:
September 19, 2024
Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT K row, with his illness halted, Fields was ready for his last performances, the priceless but all-too-brief series he made for Universal. Except for David Copper field, for which he was loaned to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, his pictures had been done for Paramount, but money disputes and other frictions caused him to seek another sponsor. He was beginning the fresh decade of his sixties, one that he would not complete, and he was at the height of his powers. His illness, his troubles, his suspicions, his worries and frights had only served to sharpen his genius. He was at once at the twilight and at the climax of his career ; he had brought into co-ordinated focus more than half a century of wonderfully varied research into the elusive organism of comedy. He knew what was funny, and scarcely a day went past that he failed to inform Universal of that fact. His four starring films for his new studio — You Can't Cheat an Honest Man, My Little Chickadee, The Bank Dick, and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break — made between 1938 and 1942 — were distinguished by the same quarrelsome racket that had set his previous pictures apart. Toward George Marshall, the first director of You Can't Cheat an Honest Man, Fields was so steadily disagreeable that the company was split into two parts, 3*9