Fields steers his ferryboat for the Western Lands.

"By the close on 1946, W.C. Fields had spent 14 months, the last several drinking only ginger ale, at Las Encinas Sanitarium in Pasadena. The end came as "The Man in the Bright Nightgown" (as W.C. referred to death) paid his call 12:30 p.m. on Christmas Day, 1946. Fields, a hater of Christmas since age eight, was 66 years old.

"The death certificate lists the cause of death as 'Cirrhosis of the liver' (duration, five years), due to 'chronic alcoholism' (duration unknown).

"[Fields' mistress] Carlotta Monti later claimed to have comforted the old man to the very end, and that the dying words of W.C. Fields were, 'Chinaman...Goddamn the whole frigging world and everyone in it but you, Carlotta.' Ronald J. Fields is convinced by his own research that Carlotta wasn't there -- she was, he claims, with a lover that Christmas day in Santa Barbara. Only W.C.'s secretary Magda Michael and a nurse were present at the time of W.C.'s death.

"'He brought his forefinger to his lips to signify quiet,' wrote Ron Fields, 'winked, then closed his eyes; and "the Man in the Bright Nightgown" took him away.'"

~ from Hollywood's Hellfire Club by Gregory William Mank with Charles Heard & Bill Nelson.

Will everyone please stop LYING? Neither of those accounts sounds remotely credible to me. But I love Gregory LaCava's eulogy for his friend ~

"Bil never really wanted to hurt anybody. He just felt an obligation." 

Incidentally, fans of Fields' 1934 classic IT'S A GIFT might like to know that dangerous blind man Mr. Muckle is named after a word in the Scots tongue meaning "very large". The influence of Scotland on Fields is not too be underrated: not only did he seemingly derive his character name in THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY, The Great McGonigle, from Scotland's greatest bad poet William Topaz McGonagall, but it was here in Edinburgh that he first tasted strong liquor. So I guess we killed him.

To wit, from "An Address to the New Tay Bridge":

Beautiful new railway bridge of the Silvery Tay,
With your strong brick piers and buttresses in so grand array,
And your thirteen central girders, which seem to my eye
Strong enough all windy storms to defy.

According to the BBC, a private collector just shelled out £6,600 for a set of McGonagall’s signed poems – more than was recently raised for signed first-edition copies of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter heptalogy.  Coincidentally, Rowling, another Scot, named the character of Professor McGonagall to honor the poet.  The 1970s American television series, The Muppet Show, also included a character reminiscent of the “Tayside Tragedian.”  Performances of Angus McGonagle, the “Argyle Gargoyle” who “gargled Gershwin,” were about as well received as William McGonagall’s public recitals, which often closed in a hail of rotting vegetables.

Born in 1825, William was a handloom weaver from Dundee who only took up poetry at about age fifty.  He self-published a volume of his work humbly titled Poetic Gems. His most famous poem is 'The Tay Bridge Disaster' which recounts a deadly bridge collapse and opens with these memorable lines:

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

Equally disastrous, in my opinion, is McGonagall’s poem commemorating the premature demise of Queen Victoria’s fourth son, 'The Death of Prince Leopold,' which includes the following stanzas:

ALAS! noble Prince Leopold, he is dead!
Who often has his lustre shed:
Especially by singing for the benefit of Esher School,
Which proves he was a wise prince, and no conceited fool.

Methinks I see him on the platform singing the Sands o' Dee,
The generous-hearted Leopold, the good and the free,
Who was manly in his actions, and beloved by his mother;
And in all the family she hasn't got such another.

Oh! noble-hearted Leopold, most beautiful to see,
Who was wont to fill your audience's hearts with glee,
With your charming songs, and lectures against strong drink:
Britain had nothing else to fear, as far as you could think.

Now this Prince Leopold, curiously enough, was once rumored to be infatuated with Alice “in Wonderland” Liddell, and was godfather to her first child.  His own daughter he named Alice.  And though Leopold spent his spare time “lecturing against strong drink,” he died of a mortal combination of claret and morphine in a yacht off the Mediterranean coast of France.

In 1892, after hearing of Lord Tennyson’s death, William McGonagall made a trek across Scotland on foot from Dundee to Balmoral to apply in person for the position of Poet Laureate.  Unfortunately, Queen Victoria was not in residence that day.  Ten years later, the man who Stephen Pile, in The Book of Heroic Failures, described as “so giftedly bad he backed unwittingly into genius” died and was buried at Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh.

A composer and writer from Arbroath, Cairney launched a website last week - Scottishanthem.co.uk - for people to vote for their favourite among his 13 compositions, or suggest another song. “It's early days,” he sighs. Yet he is following a well-worn path: that of the single-minded Scottish enthusiast. It seems apt that he is a devotee of William McGonagall, the much-derided Dundonian poet.

“He's an inspiration to me,” Cairney says. “If you can imagine going into the boxing ring with Mike Tyson and he knocks you down every 10 seconds, but you keep on getting back up and you last the 12 rounds, that's McGonagall. He had this unbelievable self-belief. I like his poetry because it's unpretentious.”

Cairney was the vice-chairman of the McGonagall Society six years ago, during the centenary of the poet's death, arranging a festival celebrating his work and writing a musical that he hopes to stage at the Edinburgh Fringe. He does not consider McGonagall's work as a direct influence, but admits the writer of such memorable compositions as The Tay Bridge Disaster will have had a bearing on his own creations.

“I have worked with McGonagall's rhyming structures, when I wrote the songs for the musical, and everything rubs off on you,” he says. “Writing is an unconscious thing, you never know when you're rhyming or not, you just do it by feel, by instinct. You mostly wake up in the morning with the thing written in your head.”

Scotland the fave: search for a new anthem
Times Online, UK - Apr 14, 2008

That's what Dundee is REALLY LIKE, even today. Yes, that's right, we're talking about --

Joseph McGrath's THE GREAT MCGONAGALL, starring and co-written with Spike Milligan, is out on DVD, complete with its original censor's certificate, signed by Lord Harlech and the ill-fated Stephen Murphy, whose stint as secretary did not long survive his passing of STRAW DOGS, LAST TANGO IN PARIS, THE DEVILS, CLOCKWORK ORANGE...

That's what I call a DVD extra! Which is good, since it's all you get on this disc.

I remember discussing this movie online with David Ehrenstein, a fan of the film, and complaining that the revolutionary multi-camera system used by McGrath, MultiVista*, rendered the image muddy and unreadable. He said it didn't.

He's right! The DVD clears up the old VHS' image problems somewhat, giving us a pin-sharp picture of what proves to be the real problem: a very underlit film.

The guy on the right is in black-face (a favourite, rather queasy, comic device of Milligan's) but it really just looks like he's in heavy shadow, because he IS in heavy shadow. During one musical number, it takes ages to realise that the singer is blacked up, and then we assume his chorus girls (including, I think, ROCKY HORROR's Little Nell) are likewise daubed, since they're the same hue. Only when they crowd into the spotlight do we realise they aren't. Sometimes entire scenes look like minstrel shows. A genuine black actor (Clifton Jones, a militant leader in Godard's ONE PLUS ONE) strains to make any impression on the emulsion, except when whited up as an Edinburgh Gentleman. Despite the low budget and numerous deliberate anachronisms, the film has a curiously strong Victorian feel, and maybe the engulfing shadows help slightly...

Quite a lot of Milligan's performance is lost to the world due to strange lighting decisions that cause his eyes and lower face to disappear into the gloom. Being a product of Britain in the '70s, TGM is shot not only in MultiVista but also in Brownoscope, the miracle of colour processing that aimed to fully exploit the varied properties of the colour brown. Indeed, Brownoscopy sought to elevate brown from a mere colour to being a full-fledged artistic medium in its own right. Had the pioneers involved succeeded in taking their invention to its highest level, celluloid itself would have been displaced as a recording device, and films as we know them today would have been rendered wholly from brownness itself. This film is perhaps the closest Brownoscope's creators came to realising their awful, beautiful dream.

The presence of white on the set just confuses the cinematographer -- he stops way down to avoid any risk of glare. Never mind if most of the leading man's head disappears into the wall. When a film is devoid of colour, the lighting must separate out the planes of action to allow us to read the image. John Mackey's work... doesn't really do that. In a short career, he also shot micro-budget domestic horror film THE CORPSE with Michael Gough, which shares with this film a muddy texture and a creeping low-affect tone of despair. Which is WHAT I LIKE TO SEE, especially in a comedy.

This shot's just RIDICULOUS -- the visible source light behind the characters isn't giving off even a strong backlight and the faces are lit by damn-all. What light there is hits the backs of their heads.

What's not apparent from the frame-grabs here is the dubious quality of the sound recording. Shot in an old Music Hall in Whitechapel, the flick must have presented challenges to the recordist -- so we get muffled and reverberant dialogue that kills comedy precision at birth and strangles any impression of lightness. At times it feels exactly like a YouTube home video of a school play. 

Nevertheless, I think Mr. Ehrenstein is right, this is in fact a LOST COMEDY MASTERPIECE. The editing is very strange but often rather fine and sensitive to performance, and often gives things an added element of surrealism. So many shots and eyelines are mismatched in the opening sequence that the editor works up a sweat with constant cross-cutting in a vain attempt to convince us that all these closeups belong to the same film. He doesn't quite succeed, but he creates a giddy, concussed mosaic of blinks and stutters.

I put the disc on to confirm my earlier prejudices, and the first 36 minutes slipped by before I could think to pause it -- no small feat considering the lack of structured plotting, characterisation, scenic variety, and the often impenetrable sound and picture. The technical shabbiness sometimes helps -- many of the jokes misfire, only to ricochet around and hit you from an unexpected angle. There are a lot more laughs of surprise than the cheap jokes comprising the script would lead you to expect. Maybe a bad joke can be funnier if you don't quite hear it at first, then figure it out after everybody's moved on and is in the middle of some fresh inanity. This is pretty near the opposite of how good comedy is supposed to work, but it works here (unless I've just lost my mind, always a possibility).

The movie fits squarely into a weird and despised tradition of British cinema, where ambitious projects are shoehorned into a theatrical format at a tiny budget -- Tony Richardson's HAMLET, filmed entirely in the London Roundhouse, nearly fits the pattern, but isn't quite open enough at being set in a theatre. Ken Russell's SALOME'S LAST DANCE and Jim Sharman and Richard O'Brien's SHOCK TREATMENT embody the tradition. In a fit of madness, Richard Attenborough's OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR inflates the concept to Mr. Creosote proportions.

This... thing constantly delivers memorable hallucinatory frames like these. Peter Sellers plays Queen Victoria, kneeling down. Milligan composes a bovine poem, with accompanying imagery. (Whenever Milligan recites, an ineffably beautiful and mournful theme -- Tigon films always had gorgeous scores -- plays as if automatically, smothering any comedy beneath a plush cushion of melancholia.)

"The chicken is a noble beast

But the cow is much forlorner

Standing in the pouring rain

With a leg at every corner."

We're told that all the poetry is genuine stuff, composed by the real William McG, poet and tragedian, who is buried here in the fair city of Edinburgh. Since W.C. Fields passed through this town, pausing to take his first drink of whiskey, it is likely that he heard of McGonagall's fame and borrowed the name, which phonetically translated becomes The Great McGonigle, protagonist of THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY.

*Briefly, the MultiVista system allowed McGrath to shoot with several cameras at once and edit scenes live, as he filmed them, like a live TV director/vision mixer. The system is also used on that glorious nadir of British "cinema", NOT NOW DARLING. Watching that one is like swimming in cement with a migraine. And Ray Cooney**.

**After I made him watch a Cooney film, my chum andy Gonzalez said, "I am now physically angry that this man has had a career."

A unique exhibition of paintings dedicated to the life and work of Dundee’s famous bad poet, William McGonagall, has been officially opened at Dundee Central Library. The paintings, entitled The Comic Legend of William McGonagall, are on show in the library’s Wighton Heritage Centre and were created by Edinburgh artist and teacher Charles Nasmyth.

Each painting represents one of the many stories about the man who penned The Tay Bridge Disaster and was widely hailed as the writer of the worst poetry in the English language.

The bard immortalised
Evening Telegraph - Apr 5, 2007