An icon of Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’: the comedy actor adored by David Lynch
Although his filmography has featured plenty of surrealist, absurdist, and jet-black humour, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that David Lynch will never make a comedy in the most conventional sense.
After all, splitting sides and tickling funny bones has never been at the forefront of his thinking, even if there are plenty of laughs to be found throughout his work. Twin Peaks is arguably the most obvious example because, as weird and existential as it is, the offbeat universe where anything can happen is regularly hilarious in its own highly specific way.
The nightmarish body horror of Eraserhead, the mind-melting experimentalism of Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, and the psychosexual mysteries of Blue Velvet are hardly designed to have audiences rolling in the aisles, while even romantic crime drama Wild at Heart was subject to much criticism over its violent and salacious content.
On the other hand, his much-missed weather reports are a deadpan delight, so Lynch could easily make a broad – at least by his standards – comedy if he wanted to. However, as it applies to his own personal taste, the filmmaker seems much more inclined to revisit the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood, given his fondness for an iconic comedic performer who maintained their popularity even as the silent era gave way to the talkies.
Lynch named W.C. Fields as a star he greatly admired, singling out 1934’s It’s a Gift as one of his favourite movies. Fields heads up the cast as Harold Bissonette, a small-town grocery store owner and husband of an overbearing wife who ends up moving across the country after purchasing an orange grove, where his dream quickly begins to turn sour.
Fields initially broke out during the vaudeville age, where he was an internationally-known juggler, before broadening his range to incorporate comedy into his routines. He then segued into Broadway where even more success came his way, with his film career beginning in 1915.
His signature persona was that of either a put-upon everyman or a wayward scoundrel, and it lost none of its appeal when the talkies came along. By the 1930s he was one of Paramount’s most in-demand talents, making over a dozen pictures for the studio between 1932 and 1935, with It’s a Gift often pointed to as the highlight of his big screen career.
Almost a century later, it’s still regarded as one of the finest comedies of its era, with Lynch just one of many won over the carefully-curated persona designed by Fields and maintained by the studio that carried him right to the very top while doing a masterful job of ensuring that as much as the public believed the person and the personality to be one and the same, they were very different people when the cameras weren’t rolling.
