W.C. Pagliaccio

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

W.C. FIELDS AND ME

Directed by ARTHUR HILLER

Screenplay by BOB MERRILL

One approaches W.C. Fields and Me warily. If Hollywood could befoul a pleasantly romantic story about two attractive people like Gable and Lombard, what horrors might it inflict on us in attempting to make a movie about one of the most difficult, enigmatic and unlikely stars in the history of films?

The fact that the worst was avoided may lead the easily pleased to think that it is actually good. That overstates the case, but is one of the year's more interesting curiosities.

The chief reason for this is Rod Steiger, who gives an interpretation rather than an impression of the man who may be the most mimicked comedian of the century. Steiger's makeup is expert; his approximation of Fields' voice and of his unique rhythms, both physical and vocal, is both funny and thoughtful. Steiger obviously wants to resemble Fields enough to be believable, yet avoid making a nightclub turn out of his work.

The movie is based not on a balanced view of Fields, but on the memoirs of the young woman, Carlotta Monti, who was his mistress (companion is probably a better word) during his last years. Her view of the man, of her own significance in his life, was scarcely objective or complete. Doubtless they cared for each other in a way that the movie is not clear about; doubtless she eased his passage through these years when drink wreaked its vengeance on him. Except for a certain vocal monotony, Valerie Perrine is winning as Carlotta. Like everyone else involved in W.C. Fields and Me, she gives it a very good, serious try.

In the end the picture does not quite make it. It is impossible to understand what created the strange, hilarious blend of cupidity, cowardice and braggadocio that was Fields and that made him an immortal parody of conventional American male values. The forces that formed him are lost in the dark reaches of a youth he tried not merely to hide but to falsify in order to mislead would-be inquirers. By the time the movie takes up his story, there is nothing to be learned about Fields' past that would be helpful in explaining what one cares about, which is his unique art.

R-Rated Life. The result is a script that is merely and rather pointlessly anecdotal. It is eager to please in a way that its subject never was. It tries to turn his circle of friends--John Barrymore and the rest --into a bunch of good ol' boys, instead of showing them for what they were: the most viciously self-destructive circle of drunks in Hollywood history, a darkly tragic group. Worse, the film falsifies many of the known facts about Fields in an attempt to create a conventional rags-to-riches show-biz saga. Even Steiger finally goes soft, hinting that a pagliaccio was hiding behind the bulbous nose and the rasping whine--an insight neither Fields nor his friends are on record as entertaining.

Physically the film has an excellent look to it. If the old photographs are to be believed, this is how Hollywood seems to have been in the 1930s. There are moments--tough and outlandish--where we are temptingly close to the spirit of Fields as it has come down to us through his movies. They are sudden, brutal incidents of misanthropy (and misogyny) expressed in bitter humor that startles with the ring of truth.

Had the spirit animating them moved more than fitfully through the film, if its creators had faced up to the fact that there was no honest way to make a PG movie out of a life and an art that was strictly R-rated, they might have turned out a film worthy of the peculiar old master himself.

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