A Film Canon

Never Give A Sucker An Even Break robs W.C. Fields of his alcoholic cocoon, forcing him to take refuge in a diner, and a second, self-penned script; or, more accurately, to reduce his persona to the sum of its realistic and fantastic parts, respectively encapsulated in his passive-aggressive, semi-domestic banter with the diner waitress, and his imaginative extrapolation of a responsibility-free world from the trajectory of a falling whisky bottle. As a result, his nakedness is less tortuous than it would be elsewhere, just because this disassociation of his persona is exactly what the world's angularities so often threaten, as if his regular antagonists had finally realised that it were more destructive to market than to mother or menace him. This ensures that the film's self-referentiality - Fields plays himself, pitching his next script after the success of The Bank Dick - is deceptively conservative, a mere adjunct to a circumscription of his persona in the name of the very marketing machine that it ostensibly parodies. Hence the intensification of his most recognisable gags (odd words, faulty hats, incongruous violence) to a caricature of themselves - a problematic move for a comedian whose routine inheres less in specific behaviours than in the implication that there is some alternative, subversive nuance that could be placed upon them, and whose delivery is always a mere pretext for gesturing towards that elusive '...', here firmly reified as a physiological phenomenon: "I feel as though somebody stepped on my tongue with muddy feet." That said, this generalisation of the enemy means that, at a local level, Fields finds himself willing to play an unusual role - the devoted family man, albeit in an idiosyncratic way, as his conversation with his beloved niece suggests: "Don't you want to be smart?" "No, I want to be like you." "You don't think I'm smart?" "Not very."