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W.C. FIELDS
The life of vaudevillian, crooked pool-cue wielder, drinker and artiste extraordinaire W.C. Fields is chronicled is loving detail in James S. Curtis' insightful new booky, W.C. Fields: A Biography (Knopf). To celebrate the publication of Curtis's book, we're showing two of Fields's most glorious triumphs, THE FATAL GLASS OF BEER (Clyde Bruckman, U.S., 1933; 18m) and NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK (Edward F. Cline, U.S., 1941; 71m). The latter, while only a shadow of his original conception, is still his last great film, a whacked-out fantasmagoria beginning with a Hollywood story pitch: "The movie Fields wants to make is set in a Ruritania in the clouds that is native American surrealism" (Pauline Kael). THE FATAL GLASS OF BEER, the best of the wonderful shorts Fields made in the early 30s, is a howlingly funny satire of Frozen North melodramas, in which Fields utters the immortal lines, again and again, "'Tis a night not fit...for man nor beast." Mr. Curtis will be on hand to discuss the Fields legend.
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