The Hip Pocket #33: YOU CAN'T CHEAT AN HONEST MAN

You have no idea how problematic a problematic comedy can be

There is no single canon.

We all have movies we love.

Some of them are great movies. Some of them are terrible movies. Love does not care. Love is unreasonable. Love is blind. We love what we love, and the louder you love it, the better.

One of my favorite things is sharing a film I love with someone. Even if they don't love it the same way I do, that experience imparts something about you to that person. When you share something you love, you are sharing a part of yourself, and there is nothing more vulnerable or personal than that.

I don't think of these movies as the canon or the official library or anything that formal. These are all just movies I keep in my hip pocket, movies I've filed away as part of my own personal ongoing film festival as worthwhile and notable.

This is an ongoing list, one without an ending. This is The Hip Pocket.

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You Can’t Cheat An Honest Man
W.C. Fields, Edgar Bergen, Charlie McCarthy, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Mortimer Snerd, Constance Moore, John Arledge, James Bush, Thurston Hall, Mary Forbes, Edward Brophy, Arthur Hohl, Princess Baba, Blacaman
cinematography by Milton Krasner
music by Frank Skinner
screenplay by George Marion Jr. & Richard Mack & Everett Freeman
story by W.C. Fields
produced by Lester Cowan
directed by George Marshall
Not Rated
1 hr 19 mins

Now that I am an angry, irritable old man, I finally understand W.C. Fields.

There are filmmakers whose work has always been important to me and other filmmakers I have learned to love over time, and, of course, there are still more filmmakers whose work I never warm to. We all have reasons for the ways we connect to the work of different artists, and in the case of W.C. Fields, I bounced right off of him for most of my life.

The exception was It’s A Gift, the film he made in 1934. You can credit Danny Peary with that, since his write-up in Cult Movies set the table just right. There are a number of films that I was led to by Peary’s work, and I credit him for the breadth of his taste even if I don’t always agree with him. There are films he spotlighted in those books that I have never warmed to, and there are films I think he misjudged severely. But he nailed it with It’s A Gift, and the thing that’s so beautiful about it is the way it positions Fields as a modern-day Job, suffering through the daily afflictions of a million tiny paper cuts. Prior to that, my main exposure to Fields had been his collaborations with Mae West, which represents a tiny portion of his overall body of work. Whatever you think of Mae West and Fields, they aren’t comics whose work was ever particularly aimed at children. I grew up with Chaplin and Keaton and The Three Stooges and Abbott and Costello and The Marx Brothers and Harold Lloyd and plenty of comedy from the early days of Hollywood, and a lot of it is still important to me. But Fields? It just didn’t happen.

Overall, time has not been kind to the legacy of Fields, who had a fascinating arc as an artist. There are reasons for that, and some of them involve race in his movies. If we’re going to talk about You Can’t Cheat An Honest Man, we’re going to talk about Eddie Anderson and we’re going to talk about the casual deployment of words like pickaninny and Ubangi and we’re going to talk about how fucking weird it is that there’s an entire scene with a puppet wearing blackface. As it feels like we’ve begun grappling with the history of race in America and the history of how we’ve handled it onscreen, watching some of this work can feel like tap dancing in a minefield. It’s one thing to simply say “it was the times,” but it feels like there’s more value in looking at the context of the times and then actually looking at what’s being said and how. Fields gained more and more control over his work as he got older, a rarity for a comedian in his era. You look at genuine geniuses like The Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton and you look at how they struggled more as they got older, and you see how Abbott and Costello’s career slowly crumbled under the weight of itself, and it’s almost a miracle to see someone going in the other direction.