My Little Chickadee (1940, Edward F. Cline) is a primitive screwball comedy-western vehicle for stars Mae West and W.C. Fields. It’s vulgar. It’s offensive. And in its own lowbrow way it caters to just the type of ugly, uneducated, despicable American culture it portrays. There’s something honest about that.
Along with Fields, Cary Grant, and Katherine Hepburn, West also has invented an affected manner of speaking—a brand on her star persona. Her act relies on bawdy innuendo, and double entendre deliveries. The villain in this yarn is a masked bandit whom Mae West’s FLOWER BELLE LEE has been involved with an ongoing torrid affair with, getting her in trouble with the law. The suggestively phallic titled towns Flower Belle’s journey takes her on are from Little Bend to Greasewood.
W.C. Fields might be supporting but his schtick is as irreverent as ever. His dialogue as CUTHBERT J. TWILLIE here is drastically more stylized. Big, obscure, or fancy sounding words are frequently used incorrectly for comedic purposes. He speaks in some pithy vernacular irrespective of context using Biblical, historical, colloquial, and any other types of absurd adornment he can in his prose.
West and Fields an obvious choice to pair together because of their complementary styles of comedic performance, so it makes sense that in My Little Chickadee they play characters who share in common that they are both grifters. Just when you think Flower Belle’s gonna hustle Twillie, he proves otherwise. And because this is a western, their vaudeville ac fittingly feels like this savage wilderness precedes the refinement of Lubitsch and Hawks.
Did the racist depictions of Indians in the Old West really make it this far in Old Hollywood? Twillie’s servant (?) is an Indian who only says “Ugh,” and there’s a scene where Indians raid a stagecoach and Flower Belle fires a pair of pistols out of the window gunning down as many as she can. Some serious saddle falls. I’m not pointing this out to focus on how outdated and offensive these scenes are as much as I’m trying to convey their relevance to the movie. I wanna argue it’s a way of being honest about where not America, but Hollywood came from. The material as a means of linking the passing of a style of comedy with that of a style of living. It’s elegiac.
Is Flower Belle morally bankrupt? Notice how the recurring screwball trope pops up when AMOS BUDGE the gambler is chosen to fake the marriage ceremony between Twillie and Flower Belle and among his wisecracks we get, “I hope you’re familiar with the rules of the game.” More than implying the institution of marriage is a scam, My Little Chickadee goes as far as saying all forms of American civilization are. Twillie is sheriff, but there’s a scene where all of the sudden he’s inexplicably also a bartender (still wearing his star). And there’s Flower Belle’s hot for teacher sketch where it’s played for laughs that her math skills aren’t up to those of the young boy in the class.
And because I can’t resist this reading of My Little Chickadee as satire of how crooked America is, that twist ending packs a wallop. Morally, Flower Belle succeeds in saving the town. Helping capture the stolen gold from the masked bandit. Using it to help build schools and grow the town’s infrastructure. But the truth that no one suspects is that the bandit will elude jailtime. And his secret identity is now known to Flower Belle when she is forced to choose between wrong and right (the newspaper editor who’s about to propose to her). Who does she choose to marry? Neither. But it’s implied that she’s available for both. So she can use them as she pleases. And she admits as much to both. And that’s how the west was won. And how America she operates to this day.
Along with Fields, Cary Grant, and Katherine Hepburn, West also has invented an affected manner of speaking—a brand on her star persona. Her act relies on bawdy innuendo, and double entendre deliveries. The villain in this yarn is a masked bandit whom Mae West’s FLOWER BELLE LEE has been involved with an ongoing torrid affair with, getting her in trouble with the law. The suggestively phallic titled towns Flower Belle’s journey takes her on are from Little Bend to Greasewood.
W.C. Fields might be supporting but his schtick is as irreverent as ever. His dialogue as CUTHBERT J. TWILLIE here is drastically more stylized. Big, obscure, or fancy sounding words are frequently used incorrectly for comedic purposes. He speaks in some pithy vernacular irrespective of context using Biblical, historical, colloquial, and any other types of absurd adornment he can in his prose.
West and Fields an obvious choice to pair together because of their complementary styles of comedic performance, so it makes sense that in My Little Chickadee they play characters who share in common that they are both grifters. Just when you think Flower Belle’s gonna hustle Twillie, he proves otherwise. And because this is a western, their vaudeville ac fittingly feels like this savage wilderness precedes the refinement of Lubitsch and Hawks.
Did the racist depictions of Indians in the Old West really make it this far in Old Hollywood? Twillie’s servant (?) is an Indian who only says “Ugh,” and there’s a scene where Indians raid a stagecoach and Flower Belle fires a pair of pistols out of the window gunning down as many as she can. Some serious saddle falls. I’m not pointing this out to focus on how outdated and offensive these scenes are as much as I’m trying to convey their relevance to the movie. I wanna argue it’s a way of being honest about where not America, but Hollywood came from. The material as a means of linking the passing of a style of comedy with that of a style of living. It’s elegiac.
Is Flower Belle morally bankrupt? Notice how the recurring screwball trope pops up when AMOS BUDGE the gambler is chosen to fake the marriage ceremony between Twillie and Flower Belle and among his wisecracks we get, “I hope you’re familiar with the rules of the game.” More than implying the institution of marriage is a scam, My Little Chickadee goes as far as saying all forms of American civilization are. Twillie is sheriff, but there’s a scene where all of the sudden he’s inexplicably also a bartender (still wearing his star). And there’s Flower Belle’s hot for teacher sketch where it’s played for laughs that her math skills aren’t up to those of the young boy in the class.
And because I can’t resist this reading of My Little Chickadee as satire of how crooked America is, that twist ending packs a wallop. Morally, Flower Belle succeeds in saving the town. Helping capture the stolen gold from the masked bandit. Using it to help build schools and grow the town’s infrastructure. But the truth that no one suspects is that the bandit will elude jailtime. And his secret identity is now known to Flower Belle when she is forced to choose between wrong and right (the newspaper editor who’s about to propose to her). Who does she choose to marry? Neither. But it’s implied that she’s available for both. So she can use them as she pleases. And she admits as much to both. And that’s how the west was won. And how America she operates to this day.
No comments:
Post a Comment