My Little Chickadee **** (1940, Mae West, W C Fields, Joseph Calleia) – Classic Movie Review 1266

Director Edward F Cline’s attractive and appealing 1940 comedy My Little Chickadee provides the one and only screen teaming of all-time great comedy favourites Mae West and W C Fields and it is treasurable just for that. The stars engagingly spoof themselves and the Western genre.

It produces a highly likeable, if perhaps more modestly hilarious entertainment than you would ideally hope. Maybe the star duo were too busy ensuring their co-star did not upstage them! Unfortunately the film springs out of the stars’ intense mutual dislike and fights over the screenplay.

The concept for the screenplay, reportedly mostly written by West but also by an equally credited Fields, presumably writing his own lines, is the Destry Rides Again (1939) story run backwards. The script sees Chicago singer Flower Belle Lee (West) meeting con-man/ medicine man Cuthbert J Twillie (Fields) on a train, joining him in a fake marriage for ‘respectability’, seeing him inducted as sheriff of Greasewood City and cleaning up the town. Both doing what they do best, Twillie tends bar and plays cards, and Flower Belle tames the town’s rowdy boys.

West apparently wrote the original screenplay, with Fields’s main contribution being one extended scene set in a bar, as well as some of his own dialogue. Giving the stars equal screenplay credit was generous and well meant, but it incensed West, who disappointingly refused to re-team with Fields thereafter. This was a shame as it proved the last successful film of her career.

Fields has a couple of classic scenes and some witty lines (‘Once, on a trek through Afghanistan, we lost our corkscrew…and were forced to live on food and water for several days!’). And West has a fine array of her bawdy trademark double entendres and other one-liners to chew inimitably over (including her spin on Oscar Wilde – ‘I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it’). But oddly the duo share disappointingly few scenes in the movie together. It’s a shame and a wasted opportunity.

Nevertheless, there is a fine collection of character performers doing their lovely stuff. They memorably include Margaret Hamilton as the town gossip and busybody Mrs Gideon, Joseph Calleia (as saloon owner and town boss Jeff Badger), Dick Foran (as newspaper editor Wayne Carter), Ruth Donnelly and Willard Robertson (Aunt Lou and Uncle John), William B Davidson (as the sheriff), and Addison Richards (as the Judge).

Also co-starring are George Moran, Gene Austin, Russell Hall, Otto Heimel, Fuzzy Knight, Anne Nagel, Donald Meek, Jackie Searle, Fay Adler, Harlan Briggs and James Conlon. And of course West and Fields are simply the best.

My Little Chickadee is still essential viewing for the stars’ multitude of fans. Despite moderate reviews, it was the second most successful film of 1940, grossing $20 million in the United States alone.

The original music is written by Ben Oakland (song Willie of the Valley) and Frank Skinner.

When Flower Belle and Twillie say goodbye, West and Fields spoof each other’s catchphrases. ‘Come up and see me sometime,’ he says. ‘Mmm, I will, my little chickadee,’ she replies. As Flower Belle sashays up the stairs, The End is playfully overlaid on her bottom.

Fields first used his ‘my little chickadee’ catchphrase in If I Had a Million (1932) addressing co-star Alison Skipworth.

West first said ‘Why don’t you come up some time and see me? I’m home every evening’ to Cary Grant in her second film She Done Him Wrong (1933). It became ‘come up and see me sometime’ in her third film, I’m No Angel (1933).

Margaret Hamilton is most famous for playing the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, released in 1939. Fields declined the role of the Wizard and My Little Chickadee was the film chosen to feature both actors.

On movie sets Fields kept a vacuum flask of mixed Martinis, which he referred to as his ‘pineapple juice’. During the filming of Tales of Manhattan, a joker switched the contents of the flask with pineapple juice. Fields yelled: ‘Who put pineapple juice in my pineapple juice?’

Edward F Cline and Fields reconvened for The Bank Dick (1940) and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941).

http://derekwinnert.com/destry-rides-again-1939-james-stewart-marlene-dietrich-classic-movie-review-1238/

http://derekwinnert.com/the-wizard-of-oz-classic-film-review-14/

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