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

a town called Lompoc, which by a wild coincidence spells "Cop Mol" backward. His wife, Agatha Souse, played by Cora Witherspoon, represented Fields' idea of the typical housewife — a nagging slattern who kept her mother constantly at her side. He had various progeny, one of whom, a daughter, hit him in the back of the head with a rock before the film was five minutes old. His effort at retaliation, an attempt to kill her with a concrete urn, was frustrated by the family. The problem Fields found himself confronting, and it was a ticklish one, was how to talk his prospective son-in-law, a bank clerk, into embezzling $500 of his employers' money to invest in a beefsteak mine. To this end he had an admirable stroke of fortune. A pair of robbers, Repulsive Rogan and Filthy McNasty, stuck up the bank ; in making a getaway one of them, carrying the loot, stumbled over a park bench where Souse was reading the Lompoc Picayune -Intelligencer and knocked himself cold. Fields picked him up, modestly explained to the town that he had cowed him into surrender, even though the man had pulled an assagai on him, and collected his idea of a bank's reward — the institution's new calendar, entitled "Spring in Lompoc." He was also offered the job of bank dick, or policeman. The scene in which he went home with the good news of his capture was Fields' definitive picture of American home life. His wife, his eldest daughter, Myrtle, and his mother-in-law, Mrs. Hermisillo Brunch, were playing cards in the living room. He walked in with an expression of self-conscious pride. He was smoking a cigarette, wearing a straw hat and a ratty Windsor tie, and carrying a newspaper with a splashy account of his fake heroics. "Captured this bandit," he said, grinning sheepishly, as if he wished to disclaim credit, which was not remarkable, since he'd had nothing whatever to do with the capture. "They've got a story here," he said in a louder voice, but his wife seized the 327