IT’S A GIFT
British Film Institute Film Classics, 75 pages, London 1994

Review by G.D. Rawnsley in Historical Journal of Film Radio & television, March 1985:

W. C. Fields has been a somewhat neglected member of comedy's pantheon of film Beats. Yet as Simon Louvish reminds us in this most recent addition to the British Film Institute's 'Film Classics' series, Fields's career was as illustrious and as productive as most of his contemporaries. While many stars of the silent screen found the transition to sound difficult and often imposing, It's a Gift was Fields' sixteenth talkie and his fifth in 1934 alone! In addition he worked with a number of directors who were also prominent in shaping the film careers of other masters of comedy - Leo McCarey, for example, who will be best remembered for his long association with Laurel and Hardy, directed Fields in his most famous pool-room routine in 'Six of the Best'. His director on It's a Gift, Norman McCleod, worked with the Marx Brothers, Danny Kaye and Bob Hope; and of course one cannot forget the films which Fields made for silent supremo Mack Sennett.

Louvish uses the themes and characters of It's a Gift as a backdrop to his more intimate exploration of Fields's life and art, to separate the facts from the myths (many of which were perpetuated by the comedian himself), and to demonstrate that, true to form, Fields' comedy often drew upon his own life experiences. Louvish's assertion that Fields was profoundly affected by the work of Charles Dickens is beyond reproach; anecdotes abound, many faithfully reproduced by the author, of how Fields would reminisce about his own harrowing childhood and portray his parents in true Dickensian fashion. Yet unlike his biographer, Robert Taylor, Louvish does not blindly accept Fields' own version of his life, exposing instead its complexities and contradictions. Louvish also investigates how the influence of Dickens was central to Fields' work, especially in his propensity for inventing absurd names for his characters. Needless to say Fields made the role of Mr Micawber in the screen version of David Copperfield his own. Displaying his own wit, Louvish observes of this film that "Under George Cukor's direction and playing a classic, Fields was somewhat tamed, but only Dickens's woeful failure to provide the necessary scene in the original material prevented him from performing his pool-room sketch" (p. 14). This suggests that Fields was not averse to reworking his comedy sketches throughout his career; It's a Gift contained three set-pieces-The Drugstore, The Porch, and The Picnic - which Fields had originally created and used in vaudeville, and later incorporated into a number of his films. Yet cinema audiences were not simply given endless repeats of these sketches; rather, as Louvish is intent to demonstrate, Fields was honing his particular genius, constantly revising and refining the sketches and perfecting their comic affect. In this way It's a Gift stands as a magnificent tribute to the man's entire career in stage and screen comedy.

In a working life which spanned forty-five years, Fields will be best remembered for his last films for the Universal studio-You Can't Cheat an Honest Man, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, and of course My Little Chickadee. What binds his work together is also most endearing and is central to this portrait; his embodiment of the small man pitted against a ruthless world. Other comedy greats, Keaton, Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy in particular - were the instruments of destruction: perhaps only Edgar Kennedy comes closest to Fields in that the comedy is derived from the pathos of their lives being consistently disrupted by others. In a typical scene at the start of It’s a Gift, Fields battles to achieve something as simple as enjoying a shave in his own bathroom. That he is prevented from doing so by constant interruption and a bathroom set against him, prompts Louvish to describe this as merely the first of many such "titanic struggles" between Fields "and the universe" (p. 10).

In addition to providing a personal assessment of Fields, this book is a vivid description of the comedian's art, and an account of the painstaking creative and mechanical process of making genuinely funny films-certainly not an easy task during the 1930s when Americans were experiencing the depths of Depression, but certainly a vital one; Fields took his responsibility for making America laugh seriously, and devoted all his energy and talent to this end. The affection and enthusiasm felt by Simon Louvish for Fields-the man and his work-radiates from every page. He discusses the myriad of personalities inside his hero, and although we never learn for sure which was the true Fields, Louvish at least allows us to come a little closer to knowing him. The film It's a Gift may have been savaged by the critics at the time of its release, but, as this slim but most welcome volume confirms, it is central to our understanding of one of the most endearing and enduring figures of screen comedy.

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