[In the following excerpt, Durgnat compares Fields and Mae West in terms of their careers and of their antipathy to the mores of their time.]

Mae West and W. C. Fields came to the cinema from the regions where theatre interbreeds with vaudeville, and top the bill among the early 30's influx of vaudeville and radio comedians. Ken Tynan described Wheeler and Wolsey as the only American cross-talk comedians whose films will never have a season at the National Film Theatre, but it would be interesting to see more of the comedies of Joe E. Brown and Jimmy Durante (almost the last of the race comedians, indifferently Jewish, Italian, or East European), which may well possess consistently what they possess in extract: the kind of zany fidelity to grass roots reality which one finds in the corresponding English tradition, of Will Hay, George Formby, Lucan and McShane, Norman Wisdom and the Carry On series. Victor Moore, Jack Oakie and others bring to 30's movies something of the brash, down-to-earth, briskly accurate character vignettes which are as vivid as they are limited, and catch much of the snap-crackle-pop of the American style.

Mae West smilingly acknowledges the applause for her fairground shimmy in I'm No Angel, and happily gurgles under her breath: 'Suckers!' The film is directed by Wesley Ruggles, but its credits engagingly proclaim its politique des auteurs: 'story, screenplay and all dialogue by Mae West; suggestions by Lowell Bernardo'. The film's plot (pre-Code) is, on paper, ambiguous, but there is so little mistaking its meaning that her films, more than any others, goaded the do-gooders into their successful clean-up campaign.

Yet the film's morality is more complex than opposing the Legions of Decency and the opulent Mae's prime side of high camp. In a climatic courtroom scene, Mae, at bay for her easy virtue, argues that if some men gave her diamonds because of what they thought she was promising, they ought to lose them. The implication that the would-be clients of a supposed prostitute deserved to be bilked is clipjoint morality, and if Mae's male spectators can forgive her for it, it's for a variety of reasons. Certainly her victims are the sort of mean-faced characters who turn up as crooked bankers and sheriffs in  Westerns, and are clearly incapable of matching, even to their nearest and dearest, Mae's conspicuously loyal and generous way with her friends and lovers. Also, however, the film homes in on that challenging old saw which titles a W. C. Fields movie: Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. But as a result of Mae's forensic genius, it is respectability which finds itself in the moral dock. The prostitute's client is not only as immoral as the lady of easy virtue herself, but ten times as ignominious. And when she rounds on her beloved's ex-fiancée and forces her to admit that she wouldn't dream of returning his engagement gifts, she convicts the respectable matriarchy of clipjoint morality in its turn. The comedy's happy end is possible because Cary Grant is generous enough to accept, and to forget, what is, perhaps, most difficult for the proud male: the fact of Mae's close relationship with a man who is clearly a pimp type. Mae clinches her triumph by offering to let any of the jurors "come up and see her'. But her lover she will ring—any time. . . .

The film manipulates the moral masochism of the mere male as deftly as the more usual blend of puritanism and is, in a sense, a libertarian riposte to it. Mae West is the Statue of Liberties, whose hourglass figure sent Old Father Time into a flat spin, and brought the naughty 90's back to the roaring 20's. Like Westerns, the films are partly exercises in nostalgia, with Edwardian razzamatazz, ragtime pianos trickling notes into the saloon office, music halls with big-voiced tenors and figure-of-8 chorus-girls with high boots and feathered hats. In the streamlined 30' s, her sofa contours, her slow-drag way with wisecracks, evoke the epoch of Madams rather than Moms. Indulgent, undulant, monolith, she glides, her hips moving as sweetly as the paddlewheels of a Mississippi pleasure-steamer. Lucky all who sail in her. . . . Her mystery lies in this sumptuosity immingling with a slick, cool, mercenary ruthlessness, a Momist outline with feminine independence, a Nietzschean will to power which has too much humour not to be agreeably self-critical, and a generosity whose tone deliciously blends maternal indulgence and complicity. It's the perpetual possibility of any of these responses which gives tension and wit to lines which, on paper, could hardly seem more mechanical. Her lover asks her what she's thinking of: 'The same as you, honey.' Was ever the need to court a woman more smoothly put aside? "I'm crazy about you,' he adds. "Yes . . . I did my best to make you that way.' The wit in that line lies not so much in any revelation of female scheming as in its almost maternal tolerance of manipulable little boys. Baudelaire likened the superior lucidity of one lover vis-à-vis the other to the relationship between surgeon and patient or torturer and victim. Mae's view has a worldlier amiability. Mae's celebrated "Beulah—peel me a grape!' occurs after a row with Cary Grant and suggests that she is soothing herself after a slight heartbreak by a self-indulgence in luxury and power—slightly provocative, perhaps, in the era of My Man Godfrey.

Some lines are almost unanalysable, as when she tells Cary Grant that she's come to a decision about their affair. That was very quick, he remarks, to which she replies, "Oh, I'm very quick, in a slow way,' a line which might mean almost anything, particularly as accompanied by a broadly sensual resettling of her hips. But, whatever it means, it refers to some blend of impulse and scepticism, of impulsive passion and nonchalant reserve, of stalling and pouncing. The sexual innuendo is a magnificent promise.

I'm No Angel concludes with Mae adorning herself with a white bridal gown, a defiance of society as outrageous as Groucho's teasing of Margaret Dumont, that anti-Mae West of yearning, lonely, innocent, respectability. One or two lines work on double-entendres of sexual unorthodoxies much to the taste of the kinky sixties. Thus when Cary Grant over-romantically asserts, 'I would be your slave,' she amiably replies, 'That can be arranged. . . . "

The films themselves have aged and creak in every joint, almost giving a curious double nostalgia. One good turn deserves another, and Old Father Time has gallantly rejuvenated the outrageous Mae, for her whole style has a bland, unruffleable cool only enhanced by her archaic opulence.

Disreputable, disillusioned, dissolute and disgruntled, W.C. Fields was Mae West's comrade-in-arms in bawdy comedy's rearguard action against the galloping pasteurization of the 30's. Like Mae West, he wrote most of his own screenplays, under such pseudonyms as Otis T. Criblecoblis and Mahatma Kane Jeeves (and co-stars with her in My Little Chickadee). But his bursts of slowmotion slapstick and ethereal fantasy relate him to Harry Langdon, Laurel and Hardy and the Hal Roach tempo. In the vaudeville tradition of pompous fruity rascality, he may recall Will Hay and Wallace Beery, but his cultivation of a lordly Southern drawl irresistibly recalls the seedier sprigs of decaying gentry, and/or suburban pretensions to such gentility. His sourness at this Hays Code world recalls the Marx Brothers' way with La Dumont, but the butts of his satire are more solidly characterized than theirs. It's no accident that before Sturges, he used Franklin Pangborn and other preferred denizens of the Sturges world. It's A Gift, his study of small-town family life, is less hectic, but even more pessimistic, precisely because every humiliation has time to be winced from beforehand, and mused upon afterwards. His world has less warmth, more emptiness; in several films, his nearest approach to human contact is the dour complicity of fellow-topers. In contrast to Mae's all infolding narcissism, he can manage only a mumbling, but obdurate, paranoia.

This grognosed sourpuss is a sort of battered, half-defeated Uncle to the Marx triplets. Where Groucho's frankness is aggressive, Fields mutters to himself in an interminable monologue, compromising between anger and hopelessness. What may have started out with some hope of eventually counterfeiting an elegant Southern drawl has long since decayed, à la Tennessee Williams, to an alcohol-grated larynx rasping like a rusty lavatory chain. His extreme suspicion of the world is revealed in his bitter, lopsided lips, narrowed eyes, and the tentative, cagey gestures that give his rolypoly frame the crabbedness of an arthritic teddy-bear. He is a Sir Toby Belch cruelly misplaced in the Prohibition era. Malvolio now is no mere steward, taking orders, but that dread figure, the bank manager, and Olivia's household has become as petty and niggardly as the Bassonets of It's A Gift or the Sousés of The Bank Dick. Stout, and still as sour as Cassius, he wages a last-bottle-stand against almost everybody, but especially kids, Moms and bluenoses, that is, everything that the American way of life considers sweet and uplifting.

With Mae West, he shared an ultra-slow humour in which part of the joke was what wasn't quite said, but was, as it were, sidled around. He drawls complacently: 'There's been a catastrophe. He's fallen off the parapet. Yes. . . .'Or an enormous blonde waitress tells him: 'There's a something so big about you.' He waits, with misgivings, and in the silence it's as if a shell were whistling over from the enemy lines, where will it land? She says: "Your nose.' He nurses his ego, and bides his time, while she bends over a table, and then he murmurs, 'There's something so big about you too. . . .' His retort's crudity, its quality of anticlimax, are all part of the defeated mood of the joke. Thus Fields has an odd quality of non-wit, as if wit required a kind of zest that he no longer possesses, because he despairs of mankind. His gags have an eccentric timing, or mistiming, all their own, sometimes loitering on indecisively, sometimes appearing out of nowhere and disappearing almost before one can laugh. Fields himself said that what's really funny is what one doesn't do, and he can almost claim to have developed the shaggy-dog joke to its highest pitch of inanity. (A clerk spends a whole scene wearing a straw hat without a crown, explaining in almost the last line, that he wears it that way because he suffers from hay fever.) His burring-and-slurring of gags combines a hopeless expectation of audience disapproval, with an ever-frustrated aggression which is nevertheless heroically maintained—as when he stands over an exasperating baby with a chopper in his hand, murmuring by way of excuse, "Even a worm can turn. . . .'

It's A Gift, an unrelenting exposé of small-town life, includes a deliriously cruel episode where Mr. Bassonet (Fields) as the proprietor of a store, has to deal, not only with a baby who releases floods of sticky molasses from a barrel, but, simultaneously, with a customer who knocks over piles of glassware wherever he turns, because he is not only virtually blind but also virtually deaf. (Only Fields could get himself persecuted by creatures so helpless.) All the petty paranoia of the average man is crystallized in a dawn scene where Bassonet, driven out of his bed by his wife's indefatigable nagging, tries to snatch a little sleep on his balcony, only to be disturbed by, successively, the milkman, a coconut bouncing slowly down every tread into the ash-can, a baby in the balcony above bombing him with grapes and screwdrivers, an insurance salesman, his wife, a "vegetable gentleman ', two females being maliciously polite to each other, and his own couch's collapse. In one film he spent eighteen minutes trying to hit a golfball. In a nightmare drive to a maternity hospital he gets his car stuck in a fire-engine ladder, and lifted off the road, but not high enough to spare passing traffic from suicidal swerves. This, a classic episode in the Sennett style, is matched by the automobile's racing up and down and around the corridors, staircases and elevators of the International House.

His slapstick homeliness brings him quite near Laurel and Hardy, whose taste he shared for absurd parodyrealms. But just as in his "homely' scenes, he exhibits a far more abrasive hostility to the way of the world (where Stan and Ollie just blunder along), so, these "absurd' realms have, in Fields's films, a function of derisive liberation that anticipates goonery and its indefinable, but pervasive, affinities with satire. In both Million Dollar Legs, written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (originally released in Britain as What a Man), we are introduced to a crazy realm which matches Al Capp's Dogpatch as a parody-opposite of ours.

In the latter film, he falls out of an aeroplane washroom into a strange realm presided over by a Mrs. Haemoglobin (Margaret Dumont), a sort of respectable female Dracula whose ivory tower is equipped with hanging swimmingpools. Million Dollar Legs has Fields presiding, like the genially tyrannical Oz, over a Land of Cockayne where all the women are called Angela and all the men are called George (suggesting a happy extreme of democratic equality, and the idyllic community cohesiveness of a South Sea tribe). There's also a vamp called Mata Machri (deliciously played by Lydia Roberti). The million-dollar legs are not, as one might expect, hers, but, of all people's, Andy Clyde's, as an international athlete who, in the old Mack Sennett spirit, keeps in trim by outrunning express trains, and takes his super-superman speed absolutely for granted.¹ There is also a charmingly erotic scene where Jack Oakie and his girlfriend brush each other down with feathers. Such titillation is rare in Fields films, for, in the presence of women, Fields, though hardly lacking in deep dark desires, seemed in his amorous relationships paralysed by a suspicion that all women, however beautiful, were merely harridans in their butterfly stage. Million Dollar Legs isn't simply a Dogpatch: or rather it's a European Dogpatch, it's a last zany image of Ruritania, of the lands from which America's immigrants came. It bristles with secret police, yet everyone is content. According to Aristophanes, Cloud Cuckoo Land was the topsy turvy region where you beat your father and got praised for it. Klopstockia is the land where foreign, fuddy-duddy fathers turn out to be champion weight lifters and supersonic sprinters. Andy Clyde's philosophy is the absolute reverse of American earnestness, he's a deferential, almost feudally modest, messenger boy, and he can hardly be bothered to stir his stumps merely for the sake of winning. "Have you ever studied astronomy?' he ponders, philosophically. "Have you ever realized how short a hundred yards is?' Backwoodsmanship is in there too, and Fields's slow, full-blown style, often nearer the anecdote than the gag, sometimes takes on an almost Mark Twain quality, as in If I Had a Million. Fields and wife, having at last hit the jackpot, drive round town, followed by a fleet of spare automobiles; after each smash, they climb out and hail the next in line.

The homely and the exotic weirdly coexist. Fields hears a police-car radio describing a wanted man as having "apple cheeks, cauliflower ears and mutton-chop whiskers' (shades of Arcimboldo); or he buys shares in a beefsteak mine; or, as a bank dick, he dons a disguise which consists mainly of a length of string running from the bridge of his nose to behind his ear. These improbabilities are presented so as to be quietly mulled over, rather than developed, and have a strange halfheartedness which is itself a joke, and rather a sad one. Fields's humour, instead of falling between two stools, of fantasy and satire, wobbles uneasily, and intriguingly, on the edge of both. He seems to be taking a subdued revenge on the real world by substituting for it a fantasy one. Yet he's also too weary to develop the fantasy. It's as if he introduces, into the familiar atmosphere, little "airbubbles' of fantasy, which swell, and slowly subside, and at last burst, leaving a sour nostalgia behind.

The passage of time has perhaps enhanced this effect, since his films abound in parodic reference to genres with which later audiences are less familiar. In Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, Fields leads an existence weirdly split between a Hollywood director's and a small-town spouse's; he has simply taken, to a reductio ad absurdum, Hollywood's picture of homely Hollywood. In International House, the Chinese inventor obsessively trying to get a six-day bicycle race on his "radioscope' (television) is an idiotically Westernized, passified and cretinized Fu Manchu. Fields's flight in an autogyro, out of which he keeps dropping empty beer-bottles, refers at once to the 30's fascination with long-distance solo flights and an outrageous defiance of still vivid Prohibition. (It's easy to forget just how much any reference to any alcoholic beverage, even the presence of a bottle and glass, meant for Prohibition era audiences.) In one of its musical interludes, International House also has Cab Calloway singing about 'that funny reefer man ', a line whose subversiveness probably strikes more people now than it did then. But the fact that it got there is one of those happy accidents with which a kindly fate blesses those artists who deserve it. It's ironical that International House would today have to lose this scene, or be banned.

The one new innocent of the 30's is Eddie Cantor.² His Roman Scandals (for Goldwyn) started out in Depression America, from which town bum Eddie dreams his way back into the court of Poppeia, finally returning to save the poor from being evicted by the hard-faced businessman. The mixture of comic topicality and wish-fulfilment opulence is evident enough. Less characterful, less rooted in reality than Keaton, Lloyd and Langdon, Cantor had something of their touching intensity, and, in his personality "aura' seems to have something of each, as if typifying the way in which the various sections, strata and racial groups of America were coalescing into—not the American ideal, for Eddie, like most comedians, was an antihero—but the "little American'. There's a kind of scuttling nervousness about him which is very much of the period, too, with its hectic pace and its Depression. The stress lies on gags, and bluff-and-cowardice gags, in a way anticipating Bob Hope, a comedian with a slicker, more realistic style. But if Kid Millions now seems an awkward anticipation of the Bob Hope style movie, it is saved, like Roman Scandals, by the musical numbers of Busby Berkeley, which, in these and other 30's movies, are really little deliriums of the imagination, psychological counterparts of crazy comedy, but, with their lines of milky, healthy, smiling beauties, cosy as well as crazy. As the middle-class tide rises throughout the 30's, Berkeley's Freedonian regiments of lovelies yield, in their turn, the limelight to more intimate and "cosy' numbers, based on the "individualistic' couple-of-lovers (Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers).

NOTES

¹ Are these quick motion effects, one wonders, a parody of King Vidor's was of slowing camera speeds to make his heroes run or work faster (in Hallelujah, in Our Daily Bread) at inspired moments?

² He had made Kid Boots with Clara Bow in 1926 but the early 30's are his heyday.