Never tell me I'm drunk. I'll just say, "And you're crazy. But I'll be sober tomorrow, and you'll be crazy for the rest of your life."
That's one of my favorite W.C. Fields gems to be heard in Sunday's Turner Classic Movies triple feature of memorable Fields films. The old red-nosed misanthrope of the '30s, whose work saw a huge revival in the film-appreciation '70s, deserves another revival now. Compare his cranky comedy to anybody's orneriness today. Fields wins.
Here's Sunday night's TCM lineup of Fields fun:
It's a Gift (8 p.m. ET) -- This 1934 delight is the one with the drunk/ugly rejoinder. Fields inhabits a shopkeeper beset by a nagging wife, nasty kid, blindly destructive customers, loud neighbors, persistent door-to-door salesmen (Carl LaFong, big L, small A, big F, small O, small N, small G), and even annoying inanimate objects. All this, and a cross-country trip to an orange grove, in barely more than an hour. Too many wonderful lines here to memorize. But you'll have fun trying.
Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (9:15 p.m. ET) -- The title of this 1941 oddity is itself a memorable quote, but there's much more in a scattershot comedy so surreal, it feels like a drug trip. (Now you know why the long-dead Fields found fresh fame in the '70s.) Among the absurd doings is hard-drinking Fields following his falling booze bottle out of an airplane's open-air observation compartment (!), and landing in an isolated mountain women's colony led by Groucho foil Margaret Dumont's Mrs. Hemoglobin. It's a movie within a movie, except when it isn't. Fields winks at us throughout as he battles with studio executives over his loony artistic visions and explains what the censors cut out. It's even worth sitting through Judy Garland wannabe Gloria Jean's musical numbers.
If I Had a Million (10:30 p.m. ET) -- Fields is featured in just one segment of this collection of vignettes where ordinary people are randomly handed money by a dying millionaire. But his part's a corker. After the beloved new car just purchased by Fields and frequent on-screen lady love Alison Skipworth gets creamed, the pair begins diligently roaming the streets seeking "road hogs" to crash into. Other wonderful chapters -- some silly, some sad -- are headlined by Charlie Ruggles, Charles Laughton and more '30s stars.
If that's not enough Depression-vintage comedy (and it's not for me, since that's my favorite movie era), TCM follows it up with two football-themed silent treats -- Harold Lloyd's The Freshman (Sunday night at midnight ET) and Buster Keaton's College (Sunday night at 1:30 a.m. ET), recalling the 1920s era of Knute Rockne when college football really hit the American national consciousness.