Poppy

It's 1883 and Professor Eustace P. McGargle, charlatan extraordinaire, arrives in the bucolic berg of Green Meadow. There he will attempt to deceive the local rubes into believing his beautiful daughter POPPY is heiress to an unclaimed fortune.

Once again, the inimitable W. C. Fields manages to merge the lovable & the larcenous into a highly amusing package designed to delight even the most jaded audience. Watching him perform his classic routines - the temperance lecture, the croquet game, the instrumental solo - is to be in the hands of a comic master. And has cinema produced funnier frauds than The Talking Dog or Purple Bart's Sarsaparilla? Probably not.

Fields had played the flimflamming professor before - on Broadway in 1923 and in D. W. Griffith's silent SALLY OF THE SAWDUST and he had made the role his own. But Fields' health was now at a low ebb after years of alcoholic overindulgence and he needed 10 months of rehabilitation and a sojourn in a sanitarium before beginning POPPY. And the filming itself was not without incident: his scene on the ‘ordinary' bicycle - which could have been handled by a stunt man - resulted in a fall that broke a vertebrae, leaving him in much pain. This is not apparent in his performance, however. (Another accident after filming ended sent him back for a further stint in the hospital.)

Fields' co-stars also do much to add to the high entertainment level of the film: Catherine Doucet & Lynne Overman play a conniving countess & shyster lawyer who have their own plans for getting their greedy hands on the envied greenbacks; Maude Eburne is a fiercely protective old lady who befriends Poppy; and skeletal Bill Wolfe is very droll as a gardener who refuses to be cheated by one of Fields' scams. Movie mavens will recognize Dewey Robinson as the calliope driver who is one of Fields' early victims.

As the young lovers, you could scarcely have done any better than Rochelle Hudson & Richard Cromwell. Having both lit-up many a film during the 1930's, they bring a great deal of charm to their roles, even in scenes which spread on the sticky sentiment a bit too thick. And Miss Hudson supplies the film with its loveliest moment when she sings ‘A Rendezvous With A Dream,' a tune which definitely deserves to be revived.

Fields, of course, dominates everything. Which is as it should be. However it is sad that the contributing factor to his eventual death - dipsomania - was already starting to destroy his body when he made this very funny film.

WC Fields stars as a circus performer whose daughter claims to be heir to a small-town fortune. A sentimental comedy with music and schmaltzy love story (Rochelle Hudson, Richard Cromwell), Field is--as always--watchable and quite good in a fairly straight role. However, character actresses Catherine Doucet and Maude Eburne steal the film as a fake countess and Hudson's benefactress. Fields film regular Bill Wolfe is also fun. This old-timey comedy has a Chaplin-like feel in its blending of humor and pathos. A near-miss for Fields but still worth watching for his good performance and a couple of classic routines.

In this film, W.C. Fields who was one of the great elder comedians of his time plays a carnival performer. He and his daughter, Poppy, arrive in town. It's there that Poppy falls in love with the town's most eligible handsome bachelor. It's a mutual attraction but her breeding and heritage is not attractive. Poppy is a carnival girl who was raised by her father and traveled from town to town with the carnival. She certainly wouldn't get approved by the local society. Anyway, there are tricks and turns that changes everything without spoiling it. W.C. Fields was a comic genius on stage and in film before television. He was one of the great legends that came to film in his winter of his career. Even though, the cast is first rate but the writing is weak. Anyway it's entertaining and unforgettable. Watch W.C. Fields performing is a timeless treasure.

POPPY is an atypical W. C. Fields film even though this was the second time he filmed the story (earlier it was the 1925 D. W. Griffith silent SALLY OF THE SAWDUST with Carol Dempster and Alfred Lunt as the young lovers). This gentle little comedy/drama, originally a turn of the century stage melodrama, casts Fields as a carnival con man with an 18-year-old daughter Poppy (Rochelle Hudson). While in a small town, Hudson falls in love with the mayor's son (Richard Cromwell) and Fields, thought to be a distinguished lecturer, attracts the attention of the presumably wealthy Madame DePuizzi ("Madame DePussy" according to Fields!!) deliciously played by Catherine Doucet. Seems the Mme. is quite a con herself - she is only a presumed heiress, being the former mistress of a now deceased wealthy man of the town whose only actual heir, a daughter mysteriously disappeared twenty years ago. Fields with the help of shady attorney Lynne Overman concocts a story that he is the widower of the daughter, making his own daughter the heiress of the estate. Meanwhile Mme. "dePussy" starts to show her claws and is in cahoots with Cromwell's old girlfriend and others to shame Hudson for her carnival background and disprove Field's claims.

The atmosphere for this 1880's tale is quite charming and effective and there are several wonderful Fields comic bits, particularly his barter of a "talking dog" although I found his croquette travesty a misfire that didn't work. His performance is top notch however and the charming young Hudson and the equally adorable Cromwell are very appealing. Maude Eburne stands out among the supporting cast in a delightful role as a local matron who takes an interest in Rochelle and becomes her only friend in town. POPPY is perhaps a bit too genteel for W.C.'s biggest fans who like him best in a wild comedy but it's still a pleasing and successful albeit modest picture.

During his career W.C. Fields was on the legitimate stage long before he was ever in Hollywood and was a star of the Ziegfeld Follies for many seasons. In his stage career Fields only did two book shows, the second and better known of them is Poppy. And he did both silent and sound versions of that role.

This version of Poppy has Fields with daughter Rochelle Hudson as part of a traveling carnival that stops in one of the small towns where she falls for the son of the mayor Granville Bates. The son is played by Richard Cromwell. She falls hard too, but Fields see an opportunity for a really big con by passing her off as the daughter of one of the town's leading citizens who left and married a carnival man years ago and left a daughter unaccounted for.

There's a rival claimant in Catherine Doucet who was a cousin of the heiress and she's being stage managed by Lynne Overman as shrewdly as Fields is doing for his daughter. I can't say more, but some unexpected facts come to everyone's attention in the end.

The original story of Poppy was written by Dorothy Donnelly who collaborated with many folks, most prominently Sigmund Romberg as a lyric writer. The original show on Broadway had a full blown score with a bunch of composers all writing songs with lyrics by Donnelly and she wrote the book as well. None of which were used in this film.

Fields is a bit more serious in this part than he normally is, still there are enough Fields type situations to satisfy his fans. What was interesting is that he was being equally matched by Doucet and Overman in chicanery.

Poppy is a much dated old fashioned story, but with W.C. Fields even a somewhat muted Fields it still rates a look.