I’ve always liked WC Fields, but haven’t seen a lot of him. He’s not on tv too much anymore. The bad biopic WC Fields and Me was on this morning though. I’d heard of it before; I remember it getting a lousy review in an issue of Shock Cinema magazine.
All the bad I’d heard may be for real; I know little about Fields himself, Carlotta Monti, or her claims about him in her memoir. Rod Steiger doesn’t so much play Fields as wear a fake news and do a Fields imitation for 2 hours; it may not be his fault, as the script plays the “stick Fieldsisms in in place of real dialogue” game. I don’t know what to make of Valerie Perrine, who plays Monti; I spent half the movie trying to figure out what I’d seen her breasts in before. (I had to break down & ask the internet; she was Montana Wildhack in the Slaughterhouse-Five movie.) I think I let myself be charmed by her, same as Steiger.
The most godawful meta-moment in the movie: WC Steiger drops a trite & circumstantially inappropriate Fields line during a public quarrel with Monti at Chasen’s; she responds with “Quit hiding behind that cheap vaudevillian delivery!!!”
I kind of hated director Arthur Hiller in the first place, but imdbing him made me realize I’ve seen NONE of his other films. I must associate him with Hollywood schmatlz at it’s worst from his Oscar telecast speeches. He did deliver said schmaltz here, for sure, and the whole thing’s as tonally uneven a movie as I’ve ever seen. I just can’t hate a movie where John “Jack Woltz” Marley plays another studio boss and ATTEMPTS (sometimes less than tastefully) to give Billy Barty a real role.
I feel guilty that I liked this, but I think I did. It might be an awful biopic, but it wasn’t the worst maudlin alcocholism drama I’ve ever seen. If a director with better artsy cred had made this, perhaps Bogdanovich taking Nickelodeon in a darker direction, or it were a modern film where a WC Fields imitator drinks themself to death, I could see it being better thought of.