Silver Screenings

We just watched a Western parody that’s a lot of fun in spite of itself.

My Little Chickadee (1940) stars Mae West and W.C. Fields as two grifters who meet on a train and suddenly decide to marry.

West is on the train because she was caught in a romantic embrace with a notorious stagecoach robber, and when she refused to cooperate with authorities she was Run out of Town.

Fields is on the train because he’s always escaping from Someplace to set up a scheme Someplace Else.

When a smitten Fields impulsively proposes to West on the train, she accepts because she thinks he’s traveling with a carpetbag full o’ Cash. Fields, oblivious to her game, can’t believe she actually said Yes.

Fields: Will you take me?
West: (glancing at the carpetbag) I’ll take you, and how!

But. The genius – and the trouble – with pairing West and Fields is they both portray outsized characters, and had done so for years. Each made a lucrative career out of it: West as a swaggering, wise-cracking seductress; and Fields as a hard-drinking yet lovable misanthropist.

You can’t blame Universal Pictures for wanting ’em both. If one is good, then two must be incredible! Right?

Universal’s gamble paid off at the box office. Although critics of the day were lukewarm about the film, its gross earnings were $2 million US (approx. $62 million US today).

In terms of the West-Fields pairing, Universal was right again, but maybe not in the way they anticipated.

There are two things that could have sunk this film, but instead, they enhance it. First, the one-upmanship between West and Fields is very entertaining; and secondly, their mutual dislike causes an undercurrent of mistrust and disdain. You can’t wait to see what Happens Next.

You see, the real tension in the script is that West and Fields aren’t actually married. The so-called “minister” on the train who performed the ceremony is a gambler. We know the marriage is a fraud, but Fields doesn’t, and there are a lot of laughs as West avoids her new “husband.”

With West dodging her spouse and Fields accepting a job as Sheriff, the two don’t appear in many scenes together. Each has their own story line which occasionally meanders into the other’s narrative for a guest appearance.

That’s OK by us because it’s a delicious 2-for-1 Combo.

About Mae West

No one ever accused Mae West of being subtle. She was Queen of the Double Entendre, a source of headaches for folks administering the Motion Picture Production Code.

But she was funny. She wrote and produced her own “notorious” plays before she was lured to Hollywood in 1932. Once there, says historian and film critic Leonard Maltin, she was given unprecedented control over her projects.

“She had the right of approval on virtually every aspect of her films,” writes Maltin, “and when she didn’t have that specific right, she argued her position with directors, producers, and studio heads until she got what she wanted.”¹

West wrote the script for My Little Chickadee, but when Fields was given equal screenwriting credit for writing a single scene, she refused to work with him again.

About W.C. Fields

W.C. Fields was a long-time (30+ years!) stage performer before starring in his first film in 1915. He deliberately cultivated a curmudgeonly public image with an infamous dislike of children and dogs.

Like West, Fields’ public persona had a distinct speech pattern that was popular with impersonators, and he was a brilliant physical comedian. In his stage performances, he used both pantomime and juggling, so he’s surprisingly dexterous on screen.

Although he and West never meshed as performers, Maltin says Fields praised West’s script for My Little Chickadee.

“During my entire experience in the entertainment world, I have never had anyone catch my character as Miss West has,” Fields wrote to an exec at Universal Pictures. “In fact, she is the only author who has ever known what I was trying to do.”²

If you’ve never seen a Mae West and/or W.C. Fields film, we encourage you to see My Little Chickadee. In fact, we owe a big Thanks to Cary Grant Won’t Eat You for her many writings about Mae West which inspired us to watch this movie.

My Little Chickadee: starring Mae West, W.C. Fields, Joseph Calleia. Directed by Edward F. Cline. Written by Mae West & W.C. Fields. Universal Pictures, 1940, B&W, 83 mins.

Source

¹Maltin, Leonard (1978) The Great Movie Comedians: From Charlie Chaplin to Woody Allen. New York, NY: Harmony Books, p. 154.
²Ibid., p. 150.