IT CAME FROM THE BOTTOM SHELF!

Movie audiences never had the opportunity to see W.C. Fields as a young man.  The great comedian’s youth was spent traveling worldwide, performing amazing feats of eccentric juggling on the stages of vaudeville.  Fields began incorporating acerbic comic asides into his juggling act, and eventually, the act consisted of more comedy than juggling.  The star graduated to performing comic sketches in The Ziegfeld Follies and to featured roles in Broadway productions, before making the leap to motion pictures.  By the time he got around to making silent features, he was already in his mid- to late-forties.  Still, W.C. displays a comparatively youthful, trim, and active figure in his lesser-seen silents than in the classic sound comedies, such as It’s a Gift (1934) and The Bank Dick (1940), for which he is best remembered.

W.C. Fields is at his most active in Running Wild (1927), one of his few surviving silents.  He portrays Elmer Finch, a harassed family man, who suffers under the iron will of his second wife (Marie Shotwell), his spoiled brat of a stepson (Barnett Raskin), an unfaithful dog, and the memory of his wife’s deceased first husband (whose portrait hangs prominently in the living room).  Elmer’s only solace is the daughter from his first marriage (Mary Brian).  Things aren’t much better at work, where he has been employed for 20 years without a raise.  When Elmer’s boss (Frederick Burton) sends the sad sack to collect a bill from their most troublesome client, Elmer inadvertently finds himself on a theater stage as a volunteer in a hypnotist’s act.  The act comes to an abrupt end when Elmer is hypnotized into believing he is a lion.  The trance works too well, turning Elmer into a physical dynamo.  After beating up the hypnotist, the mesmerized Elmer sweeps like a tornado into the streets to seek his revenge on his step-family and co-workers.

In the year prior to the release of Running Wild, Fields had been given his first starring role in a feature film with It’s the Old Army Game.  He used the opportunity to recycle some of the best material from several of his stage sketches.  The resulting film was an uneven hodgepodge, but it was undeniably hilarious.  With Running Wild, Fields attempted to play within a more coherent storyline and to portray a more subdued character (at least, initially).  As a result, Running Wild is a better movie than It’s the Old Army Game, but it is a lesser W.C. Fields comedy.  As the browbeaten Elmer Finch, Fields plays the timidity to a goonish extent, making it is difficult to like the character.  And when Elmer reverts to “the Lion,” the character’s unabashed brashness is just as unlikeable.  There is no middle-ground — the sweet spot in which Fields thrived, playing the exasperated everyman in his best comedies.  While W.C. Fields is my favorite film funny-man, this is the one time where I felt that the movie would have worked just as well, or perhaps better, with a different actor in the lead.

Still, Running Wild is not without its virtues.  The film is well acted and directed, including a rather masterful tracking shot, where Fields literally dances down the sidewalks of New York in an attempt to avoid stepping on a crack.  Seeing W.C. so light on his feet is a bit of a shock, when we are used to seeing the more deliberate walk of the comedian in his late fifties.  In fact, Fields is incredibly energetic here.  The film begins with Elmer Finch doing his morning exercises, led by a cigarette-smoking strongman on the radio; and Fields lunges about the bedroom with wild abandon.  Once he transforms into “the Lion,” he really goes to town, swinging his mitts at everything in his path while hopping up and down on the furniture.

While Running Wild does not fully work as a W.C. Fields comedy, the comedian could not completely put the project out of his mind.  In 1935, at the height of his stardom, W.C. decided to rework the material to better fit his screen persona; and in doing so, he created one of his very best films, The Man on the Flying Trapeze.  For the semi-remake, Fields still begins as a gentle soul, but he is not the complete doormat he portrayed in Running Wild.  His character may still be henpecked and harassed by a second wife and stepson (with a horrendous mother-in-law replacing the dog), but Fields is fully the character we know and love — combatting the abuse quietly with sardonic mutterings and the help of the high-octane applejack that he brews in the basement.  Fields also scraps the hypnotism plot for The Man on the Flying Trapeze, so that his character eventually succeeds due to his own force of will, expertise at his job, and craftiness, rather than out of pure chance.  The changes make all the difference.

USA/B&W-67m./Dir: Gregory La Cava/Wr: Roy Briant and Gregory La Cava/Cast: W.C. Fields, Mary Brian, Marie Shotwell, Claude Buchanan, Frederick Burton, Barnett Raskin, Frank Evans, Edward Roseman

For Fans of: If you love Fields’ later comedies, particularly The Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935), you should find Running Wild to be a fascinating forerunner.

Video: Kino Lorber recently released Blu-rays of It's the Old Army Game (1926) and Running Wild (1927), mastered in 2K from 35mm film elements preserved by The Library of Congress.  The image quality of Running Wild is a bit more uneven than that of It’s the Old Army Game (which I previously reviewed here).  For most of the film, the image is sharp and film-like, looking better than one would expect from a 91 year-old film.  However, during the hypnotism sequence, the film abruptly shifts to a lower resolution source (probably a 16mm print) to fill in sections missing or irreparably damaged in the 35mm source.  The image eventually returns to the 35mm material, but the picture quality is more spotty throughout the remainder of the running time.  Still, we are lucky that the film survives in any condition, as approximately 75% of the movies made during the silent era are lost forever.

Blu-ray Extras Include:

• Audio commentary by film historian James L. Neibaur, author of The W.C. Fields Films
• A new, jaunty, piano score, written and performed by Donald Sosin

Streaming: Low resolution copies of the film can be found streaming on YouTube and elsewhere, but they are nowhere near as sharp and clear as the Kino Lorber Blu-ray.

More to Explore: If you want to experience more of the silent-era Fields, Kino Lorber also released It's the Old Army Game (1926) on Blu-ray.  And the best of The Great Man’s talkies are collected within Universal’s DVD set, W.C. Fields: Comedy Essentials Collection.

Trivia: When Fields re-worked the material for The Man on the Flying Trapeze, he used the power of his increased stardom to demand that the studio once again cast Mary Brian in the role of his devoted daughter.  He thought that her performance was the one thing that truly worked in the silent version of the story.

For More Info: Consult The W.C. Fields Films by James L. Neibaur and W. C. Fields: A Life on Film by Fields’ grandson, Ronald J. Fields.