A Filha do Saltimbanco

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.

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.

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.

POPPY (Paramount, 1936), directed by A. Edward Sutherland, stars WC Fields as Professor Eustace McGargle, a role he originated in the 1923 stage production of the same name, and reprized in a silent 1925 adaptation retitled SALLY OF THE SAWDUST for United Artists, directed by D.W. Griffith, starring Carol Dempster not as Poppy, but as Sally. This 1936 version, which premiered June 25, 2001, on Turner Classic Movies, is said to have been more faithful to the play than the Griffith-directed incarnation. Aside from the usual Fields comedy supplements, he also manages to show the sentimental side to his character, as he did as The Great McGonigle in THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY (1934), where he also cheated suckers while finding time to be a loving and caring father to his grown daughter. POPPY could very well have been a sequel to THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY, considering the same time period and Fields' character names in both films sounding identical, from McGonigle to McGargle. However, I find POPPY to be one of Fields' more quieter comedies. Host Robert Osborne of TCM mentioned prior the presentation of the movie that Fields was quite ill and in great pain during the making of the movie, but succeeded in finishing the film in what might have been his farewell performance (which explains why WC wasn't having his usual field day as he did in his past comedies). Had Fields died following the completion of the film, what a fine conclusion it would have been to his great career, with W.C. not only reprising the role he made famous on stage, but in saying this memorable line to his on-screen daughter, Poppy, as he gives her his expert fatherly advice, "Never give a sucker an even break," before the fadeout.

Set in 1883, Professor Eustace McGargle, a swindling carnival man wearing top hat, checkered pants and spats, comes to a small town with his daughter, Poppy (Rochelle Hudson) where he establishes himself as the prize medicine selling star of a traveling carnival, while Poppy wanders about and meets and falls in love with Billy Farnsworth (Richard Cromwell), a mayor's son, but because of Poppy's sideshow background, the Farnsworth family look down on her. Only Sarah Tucker (Maude Eburne), a matron woman, takes a liking to Poppy, and later discovers something about her true identity that makes things right again with the Farnsworths.

Aside from the romantic subplot between Hudson and Cromwell (who nearly resembles MGM's own Franchot Tone when wearing that derby), Fields manages to come off with some good comedy routines, such as cheating a bartender into buying his "talking" dog; purchasing frank-furthers (or better known to some as hot dogs) for himself and Poppy from a vendor (Tom Kennedy) with McGargle telling him that he will get paid at the conclusion of his engagement. The outraged vendor demands the money for his hot dogs, so McGargle and Poppy decide that since they cannot pay for them, they might as well give them back to him, half-eaten, ending with this funny exchange: Kennedy: "Listen you tramp, how am I gonna sell these again?" Fields: "First you insult me, then you ask my advice concerning salesmanship!" This amusing bit is soon followed by McGargle selling medicine bottles for one dollar. A naive patron (Bill Wolfe) acquires one and pays for them by giving McGargle a $5 bill, but never gets his $4 change. Instead, McGargle quiets down the customer by giving him four more bottles, and "No more!!"; followed by some amusing bits involving character actress Catherine Doucet as Countess Maggie Tubbs DePuizzi. When Fields is not on screen, Hudson as Poppy gets to sing one nice song, "Rendezvous With a Dream" (by Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin) twice. The title tune of "Poppy" is sung by off-screen singers during its opening credits. Also featured in the cast are Lynne Overman as a hick lawyer; Rosalind Keith as the snobbish Frances Parker; and Granville Bates, among others.

In spite of some leisure moments, POPPY, at 73 minutes, is really worth viewing and rediscovering to fans of the Great Tomato Nose Thanks to TCM for bringing this rare gem back on TV again. Currently available on DVD. (***1/2)

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.