To drown in a vat of whiskey - NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK (1941)

"last time it was pink elephants..."

Why is booze funny? What makes this scourge of human civilization, Homer's "cause of, and cure for, all life's problems" so irresistibly funny even when unrepentantly horrible? Can we find out by examining the last film of W.C. Fields', the groundbreaking, surreal, meta, and bizarro masterpiece, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941)? Yes. As Fields says in Poppy, "Without purple bark sarsaparilla this mundane sphere of ours would be barren, bleak, and dank."

"Oh, Uncle Bill. But I still love him."

When I was getting sober I vowed never to lose my affinity for Fields. Booze was a big problem for him, too. And he tried sobriety, especially during a drying out period that saw the end of his Paramount days and 1938, the beginning of his Universal period, inarguably his best. When he came back, though, his boozing had become a cornerstone of his schtick. Of his earlier films, hard drinking only figured in a handful of films. He barely drank at all in It's a Gift. Drank nothing at all in The Old Fashioned Way, Poppy (in both of which he wore a ridiculous, Ziegfeld-style clown costume) and Tillie and Gus, and only had a few evening apple jack nightcaps in Man on the Flying Trapeze. Just being mean to children and never paying his boarding house tabs was enough to be a rogue apparently. But in 1939, for Universal, starting with You Can't Cheat an Honest Man, Fields had full script control, the kid gloves were off and the madness began hellish and chasherlesh.

Over the years I've grown comfortable with the idea of never being able to drink again (it's been 15 misera--I mean beautiful years). The sorrows of life are the joys of art, and all that, so if you're an artist or writer, what better than sorrow?  And as far as muses go, booze is a beautiful, wild demoness. I was just too weak in the end to keep up with her so had to let her go, but I still love her and Fields, slowly dying of alcoholism by the time of NEVER, agreed.  The eternal thirst becomes funny even at its most tragic level, the ultimate in heartbreak, through Fields' blearily-focused lens. I've used the metaphor before of climbing a rocky, snowy mountain as marriage, work, responsibility, chores, mortgages, nagging wife dogging you all the way, and then, when you're 3/4 of the way up the snowy mountain, suddenly a beautiful girl comes sledding past shouting "jump on!" You have a half a tick to decide because she's not slowing down and even though a part of you has vowed to never cheat or jeopardize your home, you just jump on, clamp your hands around her waist and down you plunge, your wife's angry cries disappearing immediately into the background winds.

Then you get to the bottom, and her boyfriend is waiting to punch you in the nose. The girl laughs, and grabs her toboggan and the next chairlift while you lie there, your blood spilling all over the snow. What do you shout to yourself? "Again!"


Booze is like that, and Fields' love for booze reflects a very clear need to escape, to vamoose, to disappear into the ether, down the mountain on booze's reckless sled and thus to let the vicious roundelay of sleeping, waking, eating, shitting, working, dying, recede like the fading cries of your outraged shrew wife.  Even if the disappearance is only temporary, just time eased from its wearying consistency for half a tick, it's worth it.

Civilization has, in it's way, never been able to shake this wild demoness either. Prohibition just made the stuff harder to get, and so more precious, a shared joke with the speakeasy passwords, watered down overpriced Canadian Club, and gold diggers three thick at the bar. Part of the charm of setting a film like International House in China was the lack of prohibition; Americans came out there to get away from the madness. Once prohibition was repealed, things went back to normal, like it does a few months after you turn 21 and the thrill of unlimited access without need of a fake license wears off. So being sober and Lacanian means understanding the reality of booze, which is that getting blotto, never measures up to the wam glow anticipation of getting blotto. The buzz is like music, ephemeral, but in actual consumption of booze comes the fallout of hangover, sloppiness, missed deadlines, illness, and amnesia, and worse, the occasional 'missed launch' wherein you can be so shitfaced you can't stand up and yet horribly sober, miserably conscious of how unenraptured you are no matter how drunk you get. (For a great description of this horror, read Kerouac's Big Sur).

People get into this loop with lovers all the time: you see a beautiful girl, meet her, click, it's magic; one booty call later and you shrink in horror just running into her on the street. Why not leave desire just as it is, desire? It sounds sad, but there's a unique freedom in it once you get over the initial sense of hopelessness. The absence of the desired object creates the longing, which is itself the reward. No romance is ever purer than when the lovers are apart. All it takes is the willingness to embrace Lacanian precepts and let them erode your delusions, like those nanobots in GI JOE: RISE OF THE COBRA!



Now there are people who aren't alcoholics, so they don't know the joys and terrors of addiction, the horror of convulsions and D.T.s when you quit cold turkey and can't find the half a Valium you had saved. Or the giddy ecstasy of waking up feeling like death, pouring a 50/50 gin and grapefruit juice highball, pounding it down in a single gulp, repeating twice, and sitting down to watch your favorite bender movie, SPECIES or APOCALYPSE NOW, and realizing it's only six AM on a Sunday, not six PM, like you feared. You have hours left to try and taper off before work! The world is your oyster! The agony and ache of your morning hangover vanishes and is replaced by ecstasy in a matter of minutes. Suddenly it's six AM on a Monday, and you're thinking of reasons you can't come into work that are not already exhausted.  Godfrey Daniel!

The best way I've learned to explain it is on a mood count of 1-10, ten being exaltation and ecstasy, 1 being grimly depressed or suffering withdrawal. The average person stays around a 5, and drinking brings them to a 6, maybe 7, then back down to a 4 for the next morning, then up to 5 again. But the average sober rating for gamma alcoholics suffering from low affect tolerance, like W.C. Fields and me, is 3, and then drinking catapults to a perfect 10, then goes sailing downwards, arriving at 1 one way or the other, eventually. If you keep a steady buzz throughout the day, you can manage an extended wobble between 7-9, but the longer you keep that up the more harrowing, miserable, and lengthy your stay down at 1, over that toilet, beholding your skull reflection in the waters, because you're too sick to choke down the booze you need to stop you from being too sick to drink. My friends, when that happens, take a break from your six hour stint hyperventilating over the toilet bowl and lean back on the cold tiles and think, "Erich and Fields were here!" And bask in the comfort that there's literally nowhere else to go but up -- or down to zero. And zero means you're off the scale - unconscious, dead, or having a massive orgasm --there is no difference. Zero is both higher than 10 and lower than 1 --again, there is no difference. Either way, you literally cannot lose.


Fields made it to zero, as we all must, and hasn't worked a day since, but everyone of us still bouncing up this scale and back down longs to escape it, not just to return to the dubious joy of sobriety or alcohol but to transcend the scale altogether, to die, to be really drowned in a vat of whiskey.... that must be... glorious. But since it's too hard to kill yourself, or become a vampire, drink's a fine second, a temporary respite from the abyss of addiction, which it itself engenders (to paraphrase Nicholas St. John).

"I was in love with a beautiful blonde once dear, she drove me to drink. That's the one thing I'm indebted to her for," says Fields. It's one of Sucker's more indelible lines, and probably true and it's packed with Lacanian subtext: in ruining his life, this blonde set him free. She brought him down to the 1 or the 2, allowing for more velocity on the rocket up to 10. And that's what we alcoholics really love, the velocity. To shoot from a 1 to a 10 is way more awesome than going from 5-9. In fact you don't even really make 10 unless you get a good velocity going, a good bounce on the bottom spring. If you start at a 9 you'll never even notice the difference! To savor the rush of the climb you need the spring at the bottom, like the bottom of a slot for AA batteries in your remote control. This allows you a bungee-style chance to press your face against the prison glass of death, even sneer at it as it almost grabs you in its skeletal claws, and then suddenly you're bouncing off the bottom, out of its reach, and all one's minor problems--debt, bad marriages, legal troubles, unemployment, bad reviews--recede behind you like that shrew wife's wailing as you rise and rise to 10. DING! A winna! Everything but being alive and relatively uninjured is cake, minor little mosquito bites on a man running for his life (or from his life).  Such a man is Fields. In Never he even literally bounces.

Booze gets you down, and then it gets you back up, like Maxine in Night of the Iguana. She'll always get you back up. Yet at the same time it's the thing that drove you down to the depths in the first place. The technicolor joy of the first few cocktails is just a brief oasis between vast black and white stretches of inhospitable hangover and St. Vitus-dervished desert. But some of us are born to it, like Lawrence, of Arabia. So while I idealize bourbon, reaching slowly with my outstretched fingers towards the giant Knobb Creek bottle in the liquor store window while Sara McLachlan sings "I will remember you / do you remember me?" in my headphones and gentle rain falls, Lacan helps me know that the warm love I feel in my heart is itself the reward, because I have made the sacrifice ala Stella Dallas or Harry and the Hendersons. I can enjoy the feeling I get from remembering booze and yet be free from the torture of longing or the crush of expectations.  Or as they say in AA, "happiness is never experienced, only remembered." Lacan might add, "by it's very definition!"

Fields knew this intrinsically, having had a horrible childhood, having run away from home due to an abusive father. He slept on the street or in unheated pool halls while teaching himself juggling, and yet he made it to the big time. Still, he had no recourse to his messed up existence but to just try and easy does it til cocktail hour, and while he may be metatextually wasted out of his mind here and there onscreen (like the ride with the mayor in You're Telling Me) most of the time he's as nimble as a mountain goat, recycling tin can gags he's been kicking around since the old Follies days but making them fresh as newly-watered daisies, even while eyeing his own drinking through a pragmatic, honest, delightful, hilarious prism.

I have a similar, profound relationship to Never Give a Sucker and Even Break (1941), which aired at 5 AM on a local TV station one early Saturday morning in 1983, when I was 16, the morning before I had to go to my very first-ever day of work. I was tired, of course, having gotten up so early on a Saturday (our VCR timer was unreliable, so I'd get up early and sneak downstairs while my parents still slept, to edit out commercials and musical numbers), and then I had to get up a few hours later to stand and operate a creaky, noxious-fume spewing copier... nonstop for six hours, my chain-smoking boss lady leaping down my throat at the first pause in the clanking, as she stapled copies next to me. I was way too shy to ever ask for my breaks, presuming she would just give them to me at the appropriate time. She didn't.

"couldn't stand the noise..."

It's no coincidence that my two favorite films of Fields involve copious drinking and air travel of a uniquely Fieldsian character: the autogyro (in International House) and a giant airliner with an open air rear observation compartment and berths like a sleeper car in Sucker. For being 'up in the air' offers its own unique freedom - high in the clouds, free of all responsibility. One is essentially in heaven, Eden, free to drink into oblivion while surrounded by clouds which "look just as fleecy as... clouds" and being waited on by beautiful women.



Fields sings this awesome song while still in his berth after being woken by the stewardess. we see the women in earshot smiling wistfully, with the rush of the airplane in the background it becomes a scene of bliss, a mirror to the earlier scene of Gloria Jean's gypsy folk song while reaction shots of adoring lambs and donkeys intersperse and the camera tracks slowly back to reveal the diegetic, camera-within-the-shot, and microphone and lighting guys. There's a few feints at America's embattled neutrality involving a big mustachioed Russian with huge silk pants who gets "on the head hitted" with a croquet mallet Fields borrows from an Englishman. "I'm neutral, go ahead" Fields says (we wouldn't officially join the war until the following year). Fields seems to be angling for some humor of how uncomfortable it is trying to share space with a giant in an airport bathroom, but he loses his way and winds up with a gag about shaving each other by accident ("that's a hot one!"), and things you only notice after seeing it a few dozen times, are slowly revealed, ike how Fields quietly robs the Russian giant of the contents of his bathroom kit, just in a manner so slight and steady one basically has to focus only on his hands.

This thirst for freedom, the ferocity of chasing your dreams, even if the dream is destruction, even if it pulls you from the forward movement of time into a vertical plunge, this is the definition of America. Here, Fields jumps out the window and is taking a chance, that's the point, as he tells Og Oggilby in his previous film, The Bank Dick (1940): "My uncle, a balloon ascensionist, Effingham Hoofnagle, took a chance. He was three miles and a half up in the air. He jumped out of the basket of the balloon and took a chance of alighting on a load of hay."

"Golly! Did he make it?" Oggilby asks.

"Ah, no... no he didn't, Og. Had he been a younger man he probably would have made it. That's the point. Don't wait too long in life."

The Buddha could not have said it better. Then again, instead of taking a chance you can just stay in the airplane, and write a script about jumping... that's the transubstantiation of creativity at work. Just be smart enough to hide your bottle between your feet, instead of on the open air rear observation compartment window sill.



The normal act of the 'old reprobate' is to make moves on the young daughter, and here in this surreal 'nest' there's nowhere else to go on the mesa but down, The mother (Margaret Dumont), Mrs. Hemoglobin and her fanged rottweiler are inescapable. She might move from outraged to flattered and preparing for her own squigilum rubber, but in some ways this even more alarming. The mesa top is small and we can see the whole thing in detail (above), the round bed on which Ouilatta Hemoglobin (Susan Miller) reclines, looking up in calm astonishment. But just as there's no man around, there's no escape from her mother, "a buzzard if ever there was one," as he later explains to visiting engineers Charles Lang and Emmett Vogan (below). So down he plunges. On a subtextual level, the daughter and mother (and dog) are inescapably joined. Just as Sue Lyon in Lolita inevitably turns into Shelly Winters (see Lyon in Winters) there's no freezing Ouilatta in time, she will become a great dane-Hemoglobin hybrid. His best bet for female companionship is celibacy, to avoid the Humbert Humbert trap and stay the good uncle role with Gloria Jean. It's his one redeeming trait.


Director Cline and Fields incorporate one of Gloria Jean's Russian peasant songs via a mirculous scene in the Russian village bar. Fields is told that the buzzard who lives on the mountain top is rich, causing him to immediately have a moment of clarity about his undying love for Mrs. Hemoglobin. As the music swells slow and mysterieux in the background, he notes, eyes a-twinkle, "she has a good heart, too... in fact she seems like an awfully nice woman to me.... now that I come to think of it." The chorus of the Russian villagers grows louder and we cut back to Gloria Jean joining in the peasant song as her wagon rides up to the village ("How do I get to the Russian village?" - as if there's only one) the song and gypsies seem to coast into the town on the unearthly but achingly gorgeous vibe of their song, Gloria Jean wailing over the top in long sustained notes like a theremin, or Louis Armstrong. So the music here functions in a bizarre way: we don't often hear the music of a separate scene leak over into the other and perform an entirely seaparate function. And we're glad to see the pair re-united after Fields' sudden and strange departure.

And the setting of Russia is telling too. Universal and other patriotic studios were pouring Russian elements into all their films at the time, to create a good vibe for our still allegedly neutral country, to soothe worries about our alliance with a country with a conflicting ideology,  even though they were in some ways little better than Nazis themselves, thanks to the tyrannical purges of Stalinism.

Jongo the gorilla is also an interesting element, too, as he causes Leon Errol to pass out with fear as he's taking a swig from his goat's milk. Jongo sniffs it, freaks out and rescues Errol like he brought a wonderful new game to them. Soon two monkeys and the gorilla are putting their hands over their heads too. Romance has arrived and all the animals at the nest begin behaving like the Maori children humping the trees in THE PIANO (1993).