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W. C. Fields.
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Fields, W. C. (1879-1946)
One of film comedy's best-loved performers, W. C. Fields has inspired countless impersonators but few imitators. In more than forty films over three decades, the bulbo...
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The American comedian W. C. Fields (1879-1946) appeared in many of the classic early motion picture comedies.The son of an immigrant Cockney vegetable peddler, W. C. Fields was born William Claude Duk...
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W. C. Fields was the stage name for William Claude Dukenfield, a brilliant and highly original comedian. A former vaudeville star, Fields was never comfortable working in the motion picture studio sys...
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In the following essay, Broun offers his appraisal of Fields's performance in the film Ballyhoo.
To me this seems a year in which the musical comedies distinctly show the way to so-called legit...
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In the following essay, Galligan examines Fields's psychohistory, with emphasis on ways that Fields overcame the misery of his childhood and the self-pity that might have arisen from it.
What a...
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In the following essay, Gehring equates Fields's persona with that of Shakespeare's Falstaff.
In writing a book on America's greatest native-born comedian (see W. C. Fields: A Bio...
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In the following essay, Gehring provides a review of two dozen short comic sketches written and copyrighted by Fields during a twenty-year period.
While doing research on America's greatest nat...
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In the following essay, Priestly eulogizes Fields.
So now there is another cold gap, for W. C. Fields is dead. I wrote the rough treatment of a film for him once—and kept my family all winter i...
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In the following excerpt, Ford offers his personal recollections of Fields.
W. C. Fields is generally acknowledged to be the supreme comic artist of his time, in my own opinion the funniest man who ev...
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In the following essay, Kenner presents Fields as a critic of the society in which he lived.
"The buyer tries to come back with a lower counter-offer. "You're crazy!' reto...
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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 region...
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In the following excerpt, Maltin contrasts Fields's popularity with 1970s audiences to the often disapproving response he received in his own day.
In the 1920s and 1930s, one of the most intere...
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In the following excerpt, McCaffrey examines Fields's comic technique as displayed in his films.
As if he were a gift from some ancient muse, a successful vaudeville juggler underwent a slow bu...
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In the following essay, Sheed presents Fields in an unsentimental light, and faults Ronald Fields for his attempts to sanitize his grandfather's autobiography.
Of all the subjects that don�...
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Fields, W. C. (1879-1946)
W. C. Fields
W. C. Fields
Critical Essay by Heywood Broun
