Pool Sharks

W.C. Fields is one of my many gods of cinema. I've probably seen more of his films than most people, since I compulsively watched (and taped) all of his movies when he was TCM's Star of the Month last June. In fact, I did get a little sick of him from overexposure, and there are several I still need to watch. I just got the Criterion "6 Short Films" disc and watched the only two of them I hadn't seen, including The Pool Sharks. Well, this one is pretty lame. It's his first film, and it's a silent one. You would be absolutely right in thinking that the medium of silent films doesn't suit The Great Man at all. All this film is is gross slapstick. Some of it is funny, but nothing hilarious. It's very well worth seeing, especially for the surreal stop-motion animated pool ball scene. It's actually very difficult to tell what's going on in that sequence, but it looks neat. And if you watch it frame by frame, you will notice a goof: the animator's hands are caught in one of the shots on the left side of the screen! 6/10.

Pool Sharks was a short subject film made in New York while W.C. Fields was in the Ziegfeld Follies. It must have been work for a day or two when they didn't have matinées and Fields co-stars with another silent screen comedian Ben Ross who never quite had the career Fields did. These are the only two names in the cast. We don't even get to see the name of the girl these two are fighting over.

After some slapstick attempts of oneupmanship with the girl watching the two take it to a poolroom with her and a crowd watching Fields and Ross square off over the green felt table. Naturally we don't see the color.

At this point I was expecting to see something like the pool game that was prominent in Six Of A Kind. Instead I got to see some crude animation as both these guys make some impossible shots that even Minnesota Fats would have said were impossible.

Without the voice, but those famous reactions to life that Fields was later famous for in the Thirties are all present in Pool Sharks. A must for fans of the great comic cynic W.C. Fields.

Given its significance in the career of the great comic W.C. Fields, "Pool Sharks" would certainly be worth seeing for its historical interest alone. In itself, it's probably just an average feature for its time and genre, and it doesn't give Fields the chance to shows his greatest strengths, but it is fun to see him in such an early screen appearance.

You can see the strong influence of Chaplin and Keystone, as the plot and all the characters are patterned after those styles. Fields plays one of two rivals for the hands of a girl, and his character gets involved in the kind of manic slapstick that characterized a great many short comedies in the mid-1910s. Nothing wrong with that at all, and while "Pool Sharks" in itself would not stand out, it probably would not have left too many of its original viewers disappointed, either.

Besides the slapstick, there are some visual effects with the pool table, and while the special effects technique is rudimentary, it's amusing enough.

For the most part, Fields himself just has to keep up with the madcap pace, and cannot do some of the things that he did best, yet you can see his talent when he has the chance to show it.

This movie debut from W.C. Fields is a fairly nondescript affair that presents only fleeting glimpses of the comedy legend Fields would become on the screen. The 35-year-old comedian is far from the finished article here. The booze hadn't yet gone to work on those unmistakable features, but he already looked older than his years. He sports a bushy moustache in this one, that would be pruned back over the years before disappearing completely, and relies too heavily on some fairly unpleasant comic violence for laughs that don't often materialise. In one scene he holds open his love rival's eye between finger and thumb so that he can poke it precisely with an extended forefinger – a coldly savage moment designed to appeal to the baser instincts of the film's target audience.

Although he's barely recognisable as the character with whom we would become familiar, Fields already displays his trademark animosity towards small children when he tips over the chair of a small boy, efficiently dispatching the child so that he can sit beside the woman whose affections he seeks. When he and his rival aren't antagonising each other, we are entertained by stop-motion photography of pool balls travelling around a table before returning to their original position, entering the pockets via impossible angles or flying onto a shelf on the wall. It probably knocked them out in 1915, but it's all familiar stuff now.

Of interest to curiosity seekers only…

This silent movie is only really of interest to me as the first screen appearance of W.C. Fields. If Fields had not subsequently become the great movie comedian of twenty years later, I am sure this movie would be of no interest to me or others who have been drawn to watching it.

I hope that nobody comes to this movie expecting to see Fields' famous pool table routine that he frequently used through his successful stage career. Although the idea for this movie may have been to reproduce that routine for the screen, the final decision was to use animated shots of pool balls to create the comedy of that part of the film. For a screen appearance of Fields' pool table routine, go to the movie "Six of a Kind".