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W. C. Fields
Marshall to direct Edgar Bergen and the dummy, and Eddie Cline being brought in to direct Fields. With the hapless Cline he set marks of high-handed truculence that the movie industry may never see equaled. Cline had been an actor of the old school, and Fields, unfairly pouncing on this, regarded every suggestion he made as a pure distillate of obsolescent corn. Walking onto a set, Cline would play in vigorous detail his version of how a scene should go; Fields, immediately afterward, would parody the performance cruelly. He danced and capered with much lifting of the eyebrows, flinging about of capes, and additional gestures not greatly exercised since the heyday of Edwin Booth. In general, Fields' parody had no relevance to Cline's suggestions, which, everybody else agreed, were quite sound.
A saying went around Universal that if they'd thrown the picture away and filmed the byplay between Cline and Fields, they would have produced one of the all-time masterpieces of motionpicture art. As it was, the footage they kept turned out satisfactorily. The idea than an honest man can't be cheated had some vast, secret attraction for Fields. When the picture was released, he would see the title advertised on marquees, and his face would glow with whatever strange merriment the words brought to his mind. A rough synthesis of his friends' opinions on this point is that he intended to convey just the reverse of the statement. They feel that he considered himself almost the model of the honest man and that as such he had been cheated with regularity throughout his life. In any case, it was his favorite slogan, much dearer to him than "Never Give a Sucker an Even Break," a sentiment he never really supported, and he was filled with joy when he talked the studio into using it. The basis of Universal's reluctance to promote such a bizarre title was twofold; besides the fact that it was mechanically troublesome, being suited to no ordinary marquee, it had the vaguest connection with the film.
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