W.C. Fields's Public Domain Comedies

William Claude Dukenfield — known professionally as W.C. Fields — built a screen career across 40+ films around a single coherent persona: a misanthropic, drunken, cheating, generally hostile man who somehow remained sympathetic to audiences. The screen Fields hated children, dogs, women, his fellow performers, his audience, and most especially Christmas. His best work weaponized that hatred into some of the most distinctive comedy ever filmed. Several of his films and shorts have lapsed into the public domain.

The vaudeville foundation

Before Hollywood, Fields had been a juggler and silent-comedy stage performer for two decades. The Mack Sennett-produced comedies he made in the early 1930s — at Sennett's relatively cheap, fast production house — preserve much of his stage material in cinematic form. These shorts are mostly in the public domain.

The Sennett shorts

Between 1932 and 1933, Fields made four shorts for Mack Sennett Productions. All four are in the public domain and are widely considered the purest distillation of the Fields persona ever filmed:

The Dentist (1932) — Fields as a brutally incompetent dentist whose chair-side manner involves wrestling, threats, and active malice toward patients. The film's most-cited sequence — Fields treating a female patient — was so suggestive that it was cut from many TV broadcasts for decades.

The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933) — Fields as a Yukon prospector telling the tragic story of his son's first drink. The picture is almost surreally bad on first viewing, until you realize Fields was deliberately making something that subverted every comedy convention. Cult classic.

The Pharmacist (1933) — Fields as a small-town druggist whose family is destroying his business. The chaotic family dynamic is one of his best.

The Barber Shop (1933) — Fields as a barber whose customers receive treatment ranging from indifference to actual injury.

The Paramount features

Most of Fields's feature work was at Paramount (1932-1938) and Universal (1939-1941). Most Paramount features remain under copyright. A few have slipped:

International House (1933) — An anthology feature featuring multiple Paramount stars across loose vignettes in a Chinese hotel. Fields plays a doctor of dubious credentials. Public-domain status applies to many prints.

The Universal years

Fields's Universal features — You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1939), My Little Chickadee (1940, with Mae West), The Bank Dick (1940), Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941) — are widely considered his peak. All remain under Universal copyright. They're not accessible through public domain.

The persona

What made Fields work as a screen comedian was his refusal to be sympathetic in any traditional sense. Other comedians of the era — Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy — built their characters around essential human warmth. Fields built his around essential human hostility. His characters lied, drank, cheated, stole, schemed against children, and were openly contemptuous of everyone around them. Audiences loved it. The Fields persona — the cane, the top hat, the mustache, the slightly-fluttery voice, the perpetual scotch — became one of cinema's most-recognizable comic personalities.

His off-screen life

Fields's drinking — a deeply serious problem that ultimately contributed to his death at age 66 in 1946 — was the source of countless biographical legends. Some are exaggerated; most are accurate. He famously kept a cocktail flask on set and disliked working with child performers (his only filmed pairing with Baby LeRoy was reportedly so contentious that Fields spiked the infant's orange juice with gin).

The Christmas Day death — December 25, 1946 — was a final dark comic punchline to a career built on hating Christmas.

Where to start

Start with The Dentist (1932) — 22 minutes of pure Fields, with the chair-side sequence that established the persona for film. Then move to The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933) for the most artistically subversive entry in the Sennett shorts. The four-short Sennett cycle is one of the purest preserved bodies of work from any American silent-or-early-sound comedian.