Dans la peau du lion

Elmer Finch (W.C.Fields) is a good man, married for the second time and working for twenty years in a company as accountant. However, he is not respected by his wife and his stepson and even by his dog. In his work, his boss and colleagues spend an abusive treatment, and clients do not respect him either. His life changes when he is accidentally hypnotized and transformed in a lion, changing his attitude.

"Running Wild" is an excellent comedy, with a great screenplay and performances. The beginning is very dramatic for a comedy, but when Elmer is hypnotized, becomes very funny. The dog is cute and responsible for most of the best sequences, and his mean stepson Junior (Barnett Raskin) is amazingly funny and irritant. The DVD presents in the Extras the "famous sentences" of W.C. Fields, and they are also very ironical and funny. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "O Selvagem" ("The Savage")

Starts slowly (though the opening exercise scene is a fun satire of the radio exercise programs of the day), but once Fields gets hypnotized and transformed, it really gets going.

Good supporting cast, especially his boy (Junior) and the dog.

I first became interested in W.C. Fields in the late 1960s after seeing some of his movies on TV, and soon read all the books about him I could get my hands on. One thing I was dismayed to learn was that most of his silent movies were believed to be missing, including the bulk of the feature films he made at the Paramount-Astoria studio in New York in the late '20s. Happily, in the years since then a number of these films have been rediscovered, restored, and publicly screened. While it must be said that Fields was at a disadvantage in silent movies without his distinctive voice and delivery, two of the recovered works, It's the Old Army Game and So's Your Old Man, are generally pleasant and amusing, if not on par with his talkie classics. A third survivor, Running Wild, is in my opinion something of a misfire, however. Here the problem wasn't the lack of sound so much as an ill-conceived story for which Fields was not well suited, not to mention a sour tone that isn't much alleviated by the occasional flashes of humor.

Fields plays downtrodden Elmer Finch, the kind of timid soul who would have been called a "milquetoast" at the time, but would be called a wimp (or worse) today. Elmer lives in fear of his nasty wife and her son by an earlier marriage, a fat teenage boy who devotes all his time to tormenting his step-father and step-sister, Mary. (Mary is played by the gorgeous Mary Brian, perhaps best remembered as Wendy opposite Betty Bronson's Peter Pan.) Mrs. Finch and Junior openly express their contempt for Elmer, calling him a "boob" and a "sap," and the boy sics his dog on him. Where his career is concerned, things are no better. Elmer works as a low-level clerk at a toy manufacturing firm; he hasn't been promoted in twenty years and is considered a dunce, an opinion he confirms when he alienates an important client and thus loses a crucial account. Through a series of unlikely circumstances Elmer winds up on stage at a vaudeville show during a mesmerism act, and is hypnotized into believing that he is a "roaring lion." He escapes from the theater before the hypnotist can lift the spell, and, in a kind of angry daze, goes on a long-suppressed rampage, using brute force and intimidation to regain that important account for his firm, get promoted, frighten his wife into submission, and beat the living daylights out of his obese step-son.

Maybe this sounds like a satisfying wish-fulfillment scenario, but I found it unpleasant and only rarely amusing. Perhaps the main problem was that in the opening scenes Elmer Finch is so thoroughly degraded that, while we might pity him, he's too hapless to serve as a proper leading man, even in a comedy. It's not a joy to watch W.C. Fields play this character. In some of his later films Fields would surround himself with mean, grasping family members, and he'd sometimes play the henpecked husband, yet he learned to retain a shred of dignity and also to give indications of rebellion simmering underneath. But in this film Fields' character is so defeated it's dispiriting to see, and the first portion of the story dwells on Elmer's multiple humiliations to the point of masochism.

Once Elmer inadvertently becomes a "lion," however, the film trades masochism for sadism, and the time-honored satisfaction of watching a worm turn is dampened by the crude, violent behavior that marks his transformation. Now, instead of cringing, Elmer bellows at everyone, throws punches, calls the directors of his firm "numbskulls" and "fatheads," and generally behaves like a drunken bully. When he gets home he yells at his wife and then thrashes his step-son for no particular reason, just to show him who's boss. And yet Elmer's dazzled wife and daughter now call him "wonderful," and we're apparently meant to feel the same way. After Arno the Hypnotist finally shows up and removes Elmer's spell we're given to understand that he'll temper his behavior in the future while still being more assertive. Okay, but this last-minute promise doesn't leave us with much satisfaction, nor does it help that, when last seen, Elmer is once more chasing down Junior to deliver another thrashing.

In 1930 Harry Langdon made a two-reel version of this story called The Shrimp, and although Langdon was more suited to the material the problem with his remake is similar to the problem here: our protagonist swings between two extreme personalities, neither one of which is palatable. Running Wild has its moments, but over all it remains a failed attempt to exploit two facets of Fields' screen persona, the wimp and the blow-hard, without the leavening of his more attractive and endearing traits.

For W. C. Fields, only three silent features are available for home viewing (So's Your Old Man" exists but has remained stubbornly elusive), and 1927's "Running Wild" must be considered the best on an unfortunately short list. 1925's "Sally of the Sawdust" must be considered a curio, as director D. W. Griffith shifted the focus away from Fields toward current muse Carol Dempster, making the 1936 remake "Poppy" a far more faithful rendition. "It's the Old Army Game" is the one other silent that compares favorably with "Running Wild," but at 105 minutes runs on a tad long (Louise Brooks, still a luminous teenager, takes too much footage away from Fields). "Running Wild" co-stars Mary Brian as Fields' loving daughter, a role she would repeat in the 1935 classic "Man on the Flying Trapeze," sometimes identified as a remake but proving decidedly different. This probably represents Fields at his most downtrodden, henpecked by a shrewish wife still pining for her first husband, browbeaten by a loafing invalid stepson crying for his mother whenever he wants to get his father's goat (even the family dog doesn't like him). Employed by the same toy company for 20 years (too meek to ask for a raise), he ends up with the courage to fight back after being unwittingly hypnotized by a stage magician, convinced he is now 'a lion!' Even before the benefit of sound, this film proves that W. C. Fields was in total control of his own work, with most of the comic business unique to this one production.

RUNNING WILD (Paramount, 1927), directed by Gregory LaCava, may sound more like a sports story about a marathon race, but regardless of its title, it's a silent comedy starring W.C. Fields (sporting mustache) playing a timid husband and his attempt in trying to win some respect from both his family and co-workers.

Opening title: "There's one inventor who should have been boiled in oil." The story begins as the alarm clock awakens Elmer Finch (W.C. Fields) for a new day that's about to begin. Inter-titles introduce the individual characters in question: "Elmer Finch was a timid soul - he had been married twice"; "Elmer's daughter, Mary (Mary Brian), was all he had to remind him of his happy first marriage"; "Elmer's first mistake was his second wife" (Marie Shotwell). " "Elmer had a stepson (Barney Raskle) also - but that wasn't Elmer's fault." There is also a family dog, Rex, who sic's Elmer at Junior's command. Elmer is a billing clerk working at a toy factory for twenty years without ever receiving a raise in salary. His employer, D.W. Harvey (Frederick Burton) happens to have a son, Dave (Claude Buchanan), who love's Elmer's daughter, Mary. Because his wife and loafing brother-in-law take advantage of Elmer, Mary, unable to obtain a new dress for the upcoming ball, tells off her father by saying he doesn't deserve any respect. Though he knows that, hearing it from Mary is enough to hurt his poor ego. While at work, Elmer tries to make a good impression by passing himself off as sales manager when Henry Johnson (J. Moy Bennett), an important buyer for the company, arrives, only to have everything go wrong. Unable to collect payment from the tough Amos Barker (Frank Evans), Mr. Harvey sends Elmer out to get it, but seeing what Barker has done to the other collectors makes Elmer resist. Elmer's inferiority complex starts to change after attending a vaudeville show when Elmer becomes the subject to Arvo (Edward Roseman), a hypnotist, who changes him from weakling to a roaring "lion."

An extremely amusing WC Fields comedy with overly familiar pattern carried over to some of his classic sound comedies of the 1930s. While some of them were actually remade with Fields in the 1930s, RUNNING WILD is actually an original premise. Some sources claim RUNNING WILD to have been remade as THE MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE (1935), but it's not. The only similarities between the two movies are that they both feature Mary Brian as Fields' loving daughter, and that Fields' character, Ambrose Wolfinger, happens to be a henpecked husband in a second marriage bossed by a domineering wife (Kathleen Howard) who pampers her lazy good-for-nothing adult son (Grady Sutton). The second half of the "Trapeze" comedy focuses on Ambrose's attempt to get a day off from work to attend the wrestling matches while RUNNING WILD shifts timid husband to a forceful hypnotized individual after returning home. The results are not only well constructed but deserving.

As much as Fields' was a comedian equipped best for sound comedies, his silent ones initially failed to compete with contemporaries as Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, yet, Fields, younger and thinner from his later efforts, holds his own here, even to a point of arousing sympathy through his sadden reaction regarding his lack of respect from his family. Mary Brian proves ideal as the sympathetic daughter, an actress Fields would use again in his other silent comedy, TWO FLAMING YOUTHS (1927).

While some Fields' silent comedies have been lost to future generations, RUNNING WILD fortunately survives intact, even to a point of its distribution to video cassette in 1992 equipped with excellent Gaylord Carter organ scoring accompaniment. To date, RUNNING WILD has never been released to television.

RUNNING WILD should be an enjoyable 68 minutes for fans of Fields or silent comedies such as this one, a rarely seen product that deserve recognition and discovery today. (***)