BEFORE: Today marks five weeks since adopting a low-cholesterol diet, and later today I'll be at the doctor's office for a shot, and I'll finally find out if there's been progress in losing some weight. My pants feel looser, and I've noticed it's been easier to climb stairs, and if I drop something, I've got a fair chance of being able to bend down and pick it up, so I think the outlook is good. I've been mostly subsisting on a regimen of veggie burgers and falafel platters, so somewhere my ex-wife is having a laugh at my expense. Also, frequent visitors to my Flickr page are probably wondering why I haven't posted any pictures of interesting restaurant food like pretzel nachos, hot dogs wrapped in bacon or hamburgers with fried eggs on top.
Today, I'm also taking a break from the (M)Archie Madness Tournament - Cary Grant is NOT in this film. What happened was - months before running a tribute to Mr. Leach, they ran a few Mae West films, and old Archie was in two of them. When he was named their Star of the Month for December, I realized that the two chains would dovetail nicely. Now, it would have been easy to run all of the Cary Grant films together, and end with today's film, but today's film links to almost nothing, and to me, that's a dead end. So I found another outro for the Cary Grant chain, and there's really no place else to put today's film, except right between two other Mae West films, which maintains the linking, but breaks the Tournament into two parts - it's the lesser of two organizational evils, the same sort of thing happened earlier this year when I wrapped up the Edward Norton chain, then again with the Bruce Willis chain at the end of January. C'est la vie.
THE PLOT: Rightly suspected of illicit relations with the Masked Bandit, Flower Belle Lee is run out of Little Bend. On the train she meets con man Cuthbert J. Twillie and pretends to marry him for "respectability."
AFTER: Since I'm trying hard to wrap up the project this year, it's time to get to those last-minute film-related sins. I finally got to Chaplin late last year, and I'll be dealing with the Marx Brothers very soon, but I have to admit that I've never seen a W.C. Fields film before (and before last night, I hadn't seen a Mae West film before, either). Oh, I know the stereotypes about his character, and I've seen clips, but never watched a full film. As a kid I worked my way through the catalogues of the Three Stooges and Abbott & Costello, and in college I got turned on to Buster Keaton, and that was pretty much that. Fields seemed to bridge that gap between silent, physical comics like Keaton and Harold Lloyd, and later physical comics like the Stooges. I guess I assumed he was the thinking man's comic, because his humor seemed mostly verbal - and when you're young the physical comedy is where it's at.
Now that I'm an adult (or so they tell me) I've got a better chance at understanding the humor in Mae West's suggestive lines, or W.C. Fields' wisecracks. Plus I can appreciate the fact that both were known for writing their own material, and both signed on for this film with the assumption they'd be writing all the dialogue. In the end, he wrote his own line, and she wrote hers. This seems a little disjointed, but given the fact that her character spends most of the film rebuffing his advances, it kind of helps the story when their dialogue clashes a bit.
Their characters fit together because they're both con artists, he's a literal snake-oil salesman, and she's more noted for romancing men to get diamonds or gold - so they sort of desert each other. When they meet on a train and she sees the big bag of (fake) money that he carries around, she agrees to (fake) marry him so that she can make a name for herself in a Western town, where he coincidentally gets set up as a (fake) sheriff. After that, it's kind of like the situation in a romantic comedy like "My Favorite Wife" - she's got to keep fending him off, because we can't see two people sleep together if they're not really husband and wife.
Eventually the Masked Bandit returns, and I'll admit I guessed wrong about his identity - I think they put a few red herring suggestions into the storyline. And I'm glad to see that there IS a storyline, it's a nice refreshing change from last night's character study.
Reportedly W.C. Fields walked off of the set of this film, and after about two weeks the director realized he wasn't coming back, so they hired a stand-in to finish the last third of the scenes. This probably motivated certain scenes, like when he dresses up LIKE the masked bandit to try and catch the bandit, or the gag where he's taking a bath and you just see his feet sticking up from the tub. If anyone really took a bath like that, they'd most likely drown.
And I know it was a different time and all that, but the portrayal of Native Americans here is downright criminal. They're either savages attacking a train, or passive drunkards who say "Ugh!" and "How!" and not much else. I guess one of them is our hero Twillie's friend, but in the same way that Kato was Inspector Clouseau's friend in the "Pink Panther" films. It's downright deplorable.
Also starring W.C. Fields, Margaret Hamilton, Joseph Calleia (last seen in "For Whom the Bell Tolls"), Dick Foran, Donald Meek (last seen in "Love on the Run"), Willard Robertson, Fuzzy Knight.
RATING: 4 out of 10 poker chips
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