My Little Chickadee

source: My Little Chickadee

I love this little gem of a movie. It has two of the great stars of the early cinema, W.C. Fields and Mae West. Fields is hilarious in his role as con man/card shark Cuthbert J. Twillie, who meets Flower Belle Lee (Miss West's character) on a train bound for Greasewood, a town that is ran by corrupt saloon owner Jeff Badger (Joseph Calleia). Flower Belle was ran out of her previous town and cannot return until she is married and a respectful woman, i.e., not promiscuous. She marries Cuthbert just to give her some respectability and it's hilarious to watch Fields pathetic attempts to try to be with his unwilling bride. Of course, since this a Mae West film (both she and Fields wrote the screenplay) there are several funny double entendres in the film and Mae gets to sing a song, Willie of the Valley. I love both Mae West and W.C. Fields...they were both legends and I really wish they would have made another film together. The Hollywood rumor mill had it that they actually couldn't stand each other off screen, but if this is true, and I tend to believe that their feud was exaggerated for publicity purposes, you could not tell it by their performances. They had terrific on screen chemistry together. "My Little Chickadee" is a fun film all the way around.

It's a shame that West and Fields had such a dislike for each other. In their few scenes together you can see how incredible this film could've been. Their introduction on the train is a delight, with him slurping all over her "symmetrical digits" and she crooning "you're compromisin' me". Field's disguising himself as her lover the Masked Bandit and getting some lip action under false pretenses is hilarious. If only they could've spent so much more screen time with each other instead of focusing on their separate routines, this would be a major classic. As it is it is still great fun. And Fields' asides to Margaret Hamilton are priceless! "I hope she don't get too violent--I haven't strength enough to knock her down!"

I believe that, some time in the 1970's, more than thirty years after MY LITTLE CHICKADEE was made, the term "high concept" was coined. So, starting in the seventies, a lot of movies with sure-fire ideas became the trend. ("What?", someone, circa 1990 might say, "Arnold Schwarzenegger is being teamed with Danny DeVito? Why, that must be hilarious!") So, clearly, somebody thought the idea of W.C. Fields and Mae West sharing the silver screen would work, and MY LITTLE CHICKADEE remains the ultimate example of both the pitfalls and the merits of High Concept movie-making. Fields and West, both iconic figures, were actually so similar that the audience's loyalties are torn. We watch a West picture to observe Mae West turn the tables on men and we watch a Fields picture to watch Fields flout authority. When Fields and West meet and appear to like each other (he wanting sex and she wanting money) we love them both. Fields gets off one of his most memorable lines as he holds her fingers up to his lips and says, "What symmetrical digits.") She, in turn, throws her false submission at him, letting us know between the lines that she's a woman of steel. So far, so good. Their romance is viewed suspiciously by a character actress who is the perfect foil for both of them: Margaret Hamilton, who, of course, played the Wicked Witch of the West the year before in THE WIZARD OF OZ. Fields and West are married aboard the train by West's con-man friend -- hence, they are not really being married -- and this actor is also the sort of figure who belongs in a movie with either Fields or West. But let's cut to the chase. Both Fields and West have separate moments for the rest of the movie and each of these moments is somewhat minimal. West's scene teaching a classroom of overgrown adolescents seems to be a whitewashing of a bawdy routine from her stage days. It almost makes it. Fields's various encounters with gamblers and a female drunk (who HAS to be Celeste Holm, uncredited, as someone else on this board has noted) are promising, but somehow never really engaging. Thinking about this movie, nevertheless, brings a smile to the face. There are so many little things which, popping into the memory, are funny, that it has to be acknowledged that MY LITTLE CHICKADEE achieved its goal: driving into our minds the idea of the harmony of two comics who'd made audiences howl with laughter in live performance twenty years earlier. It should also be said that the ideal audience for MY LITTLE CHICKADEE is an audience in a darkened movie theatre. Ideally, the year should be the year it was made and the audience should be made up of people who've been anticipating this pairing and would be more than willing to hoot throughout. Has anybody got a time machine?

Boy, I thought seeing W.C. Fields and Mae West in the same movie would really be something! However, the only thing it turned out to be was just plain annoying. I could barely get past the first 15 minutes. West's "routine" gets tiresome in a hurry. All she does, scene after scene, is roll up her eyes and say something she thinks is clever and-or funny. Since she co-wrote the script with Fields, I'm sure she thought those lines were good, but I heard nothing humorous in them. The soft lens on her on every time is pretty obvious, too. What were they trying to cover up? Her reputation is far better than her performance. As for Fields, he was better off in his own films where he could ham it up on his own. He had a few amusing bits, but nothing memorable.

Mae West and W.C. Fields working below their abilities. She's a sassy singer run out of her community for consorting with a masked stagecoach bandit; he's a novelty salesman (with a satchel of phony money) who becomes sheriff in a troubled Old West town after falsely boasting of his shooting abilities. Mae "marries" W.C. via a gambler dressed like a preacher, only to spend most of her on-screen time with a handsome newspaper man. Fields plays bartender, trades barbs with busy-body Margaret Hamilton, and gets into bed with a goat he thinks is Mae. His quick retorts and sideline witticisms get some laughs, but this script (written by the two stars) never allows for any big, memorable moments. Mae has a song number in the saloon that seems rather lax (the Hays Code was breathing down her neck at the time), and her personality appears to have been zapped of vivaciousness. The movie doesn't look too bad, and it is certainly watchable, but one waits in vain for it to get off the ground and that sadly does not happen. ** from ****

The selling point for this movie is Mae West meets W.C. Fields but I'm not a fan of the latter. The only other movie of his I've seen is The Bank Dick, which I apparently thought was okay but I don't recall a thing about now. Fields was probably more famous back then for his vaudeville work and I don't think he created any movies for the ages like his fellow vaudevillians The Marx Brothers did. But this movie is still very much a Mae West movie and I enjoyed it like I do all her work. There are plenty of one-liners delivered by both West and Fields but no one can zing like the former can. Ergo, my main criticism about this movie is that she had to share too much screen time with Fields!

No need to recap the plot. I guess Universal figured that since West and Fields were so funny apart, they'd be even funnier together. Unfortunately, things didn't quite work out that way. Each gets off some funny lines, but rarely do they share the same frame. It's almost like two movies in one. But then neither comedian needs a second party to bounce jokes off of. Each was like a self- contained act on his or her own—West with her leering innuendos, Fields with his grouchy misanthropy. So trying to mix them is like trying to mix Jupiter with Mars. Good thing the great Margaret Hamilton is along to bridge the gap. If West comes off a shade less prominently than Fields, it's probably because she's less of an actor. Basically, she's got one comedic posture, and as good as it is, her air of the sexually irresistible doesn't adapt well. Fields' style, on the other hand, goes through a number of emotions, exasperation never far behind. Then too, his fascination with words from the thesaurus is usually on dialog display. Here I really love "euphonious appellation" instead of the more down-to-earth "nice sounding name". Anyway, each was a comedic genius in his or her own right. And I particularly salute West for her daring brand of comedy at a time when censors did their best to eliminate the fleshy side of life. Nonetheless, each is better viewed in solo starring roles, e.g. Fields in It's a Gift (1934), and West in I'm No Angel (1933).

My Little Chickadee is like a home movie W.C. Fields and Mae West just happened to make in their spare time, on the studio lot, back in 1940. The budget was not as ample as Miss West's er, well anyway, it's a pretty big picture but not that big. The dialogue is better than the film, which is frankly an amateurish mess. Both stars were past their prime when they made this western parody, and both seem a little tired, in general, and with one another, in their scenes together. They're much better when reciting the dialogue, which they worked on together (ah, to have been a fly on the wall during their script conferences). Maybe they spent all their energy on the writing. There certainly isn't much in their performing. For all its flaws, the movie has some hilarious moments, such as Fields' suggestion that he has "some definite pear-shaped ideas" he would like to discuss with Miss West. Movie censorship was at its peak when this one was made. Fields and West had been two of the shining lights of early talkies, and the advent of the Production Code in the mid-thirties set them both back professionally, especially Miss West, who was the prime cause of it. Since they couldn't quite give this movie their all, due to the extreme censorship of the time, one has to continually read between the lines. There's a lot there, though not as much as I think they imagined there was. The film is an heroic effort none the less, if by today's standards rather quaint.

Mae West and W.C. Fields together for the first and only time - and how wonderfully they work together. They really fire off each other in this pretty bland and cheaply made little film. They also look great - Mae's cossies are splendid. But despite many memorable scenes - Mae gunning down scores of Indians from a train, W.C. cheating at cards etc - the dialogue is so sanitised that the pairing is never allowed to fly. Without sex Mae has little to offer and, although she tries to suggest things with those wonderful eyes, you can see her being tied down by the censors till she can hardly move or talk. This film makes you sad ultimately when you think how prudishness ruined one of the most electric partnerships of all time. How truly great this film could have been. By the way Margaret Hamilton plays a prude very well in the film - I suspect Mae would have liked to have gunned such people down.