Bill Slocum An occasionally amusing yet ultimately disappointing vehicle for two screen legends, "My Little Chickadee" gives us Mae West and W. C. Fields as a mismatched couple trying to keep one step ahead of matrimony and the noose in the Old West.Flower Belle Lee (West) is a girl in trouble, no temporary thing when the trouble is in the form of a persistent masked bandit who has been seen in her company too often. To get clear, she sets up a phony marriage with a smooth-talking but inept conman named Cuthbert J. Twillie (Fields), slow to the draw on the fact his wedding was a sham – not until he finds himself sharing his marriage bed with a goat.Watching West take Fields for a ride is fun for 15 minutes or so. Unfortunately, there's still an hour to kill after that. Contrary to film legend, the two do share more than that one scene. Yet their relationship is characterized by distance."Big chief get a new squaw?" Cuthbert is asked by his Indian sidekick, Milton (George Moran)."New is right," Cuthbert replies. "She hasn't even been unwrapped yet."It's the kind of film where repartee like that, funny as it sometimes is, substitutes for dialogue. West's most common emotion here is a kind of bored, bemused insouciance, whether she's being wooed by Fields or abducted by the Masked Bandit. Shooting down a band of attacking Indians, she quips away between blasts ("There he goes in a shower of feathers") and is so encased by her screen persona to make what passes for a story purely inconsequential.Fields does a little better. Like West, he was on the rebound after years of drinking had reduced him to radio work. His main role here is to be the butt of Flower Belle's wry jokes and machinations, an unaccustomed part for someone usually one step ahead of everyone else on screen in his shambling, erudite way.I enjoyed his scene tending bar, and an exchange he has with a pair of Preston Sturges regulars, Al Bridge and Jimmy Conlin."Squawk Mulligan tells me you buried your wife several years ago," Bridge's character says."Had to," Cuthbert answers. "She died."But this is a film more amusing for its clips than for watching from beginning to end. The basic scenario, of Cuthbert taking the unhealthy job of sheriff of Greasewood City, a post which has seen five previous late occupants in the last six months, could have been made into something; director Edward F. Cline is more concerned with setting up one-liners – no surprise considering his screenwriters were the pair delivering them!Speaking of that, West is first-billed, both as actor and as writer, and the emphasis on her over everything else gets old fast. Told by the bandit she will be embarrassed if she knew his real identity, she rolls her eyes for the umpteenth time and replies: "I've never been embarrassed in my life."West wouldn't be embarrassed by this movie; it was a popular if minor success and has grown in stature as being one of her signature roles. It's not much of a role, though, just an excuse to put her icon character through its paces while Fields stumbles along in her wake. You will be amused, too, but perhaps left wondering at what all the fuss was about.

zardoz-13 Mae West and W.C. Fields are legendary icons of comedy. Unfortunately, when they teamed up to star in director Edward F. Cline's western comedy "My Little Chickadee" that seemed to cancel each other out. Presumably, each performer penned their own lines and scenes, because this black & white oater qualifies as lackluster by anybody's standards. Indeed, each plays their usual roles with West as a seductress and Fields as a con artist, but they end up doing nothing memorable in a thin plot that seems to end too soon and without any resolution. Point in fact is that the notorious Masked Rider is never brought to justice. Typically, the Hollywood Production Code dictated that all wrongdoers be punished but the bandit never receives his comeuppance. Meanwhile, West and Fields are constantly trying to take advantage of each other. She marries him to get his loot, but he has nothing but counterfeit dollars. Former Warner Brothers singing cowboy star Dick Foran plays a newspaper publisher, but he is wasted in this nothing role. Joseph Calleia plays a greedy saloon keeper and town boss who kills without a qualm. Nothing adds up here but it is amusing just to see West and Fields together for the only movie in which they appeared in.Flower Belle Lee (Mae West of "Klondike Annie") is riding in a stagecoach bound for Little Bend to visit her Aunt Lou (Ruth Donnelly of "Petticoat Politics") and Uncle John (Willard Robertson of "Kentucky") when a Masked Rider holds up the coach. He blasts away with his six-gun at a strong box filled with gold pouches and orders our heroine to hand over the bags. Instead of settling for the gold alone, the Masked Rider abducts Flower Belle. No sooner has the outlaw taken Flower Belle hostage than he releases her later and she gets to come home. Everybody welcomes her with open arms, until a snooty busybody woman, Mrs Gideon (Margaret Hamilton of "The Wizard of Oz"), spots the Masked Rider one night embracing Flower Belle in her upstairs room. Gideon clamors to high heaven about this union, and Flower Belle is brought to trail where the authorities, principally a judge (Addison Richards of "Flying Tigers"), decide to banish her from Little Bend. The judge refuses to let Flower Belle to return until she becomes married and respectable. Mrs. Gideon accompanies Flower Belle to Greasewood City so she can contact the Women's Vigilante Committee about Flower Belle's activities.During the train ride to Greasewood City, the engineer has to halt the train when an Indian on horseback with a man on a travois stops on the tracks. This individual is a con artist, Cuthbert J. Twillie (W.C. Fields of "The Bank Dick"), and he needs a ride so he climbs aboard. Along the way, a band of savage Indians attack the train. Cuthbert cowers in fear, while Flower Belle not only slings lead at the redskins but also proves that she is an accurate shot with a revolver. She knocks at least a half-dozen of Indians off their ponies. Later, she spots Cuthbert's open valise bulging with wads of money and arranges for a swindler, Amos Budge (Donald Meek of "Captain Blood") to marry her. Of course, since Budge isn't an actual minister, the wedding is a sham. When they arrive in Greasewood City, Flower Belle attracts the amorous attention of local saloon owner and town boss Jeff Badger (Joseph Calleia of "Gilda")and he is prepared to kill Cuthbert. Flower Belle convinces him to do otherwise and Badger appoints Cuthbert as town marshal. Later, Flower Belle learns from crusading newspaper editor Wayne Carter (Dick Foran of "The Petrified Forest") that town marshals come and go like the breeze.Meantime. the Masked Rider resumes his affair with Flower Belle. Surprisingly, Flower Belle has never seen this outlaw without his mask. Cuthbert decides to impersonate the Masked Rider to get Flower Belle to kiss him and the ruse initially works until she catches a whiff of his breath. Naturally, Mrs. Gideon spots this liaison and howls again to high heaven. Everybody comes scrambling out into the night and they capture Cuthbert and decide to stretch his neck with a noose. At this point, Flower Belle discovers the Masked Rider's identity and convinces him to ride into town and thwart the lynching. When the Masked Rider appears, he slings a set of saddle bags with loot in them. Cuthbert is turned loose and the town has enough money to build a proper school house. Cuthbert heads off for greener pastures while Flower Belle leaves Jeff and Wayne to compete for her affections. Ho-hum! Sure, Mae West utters her suggestive lines and W.C. Fields indulges in his pompous dialogue. They will make your smile a lot, but you rarely feel like laughing out loud at their tame antics. The scene where Fields climbs into bed with a goat is amusing. Nevertheless, at 83 minutes, "My Little Chickadee" is thoroughly trite and only worth a gander if you are either a West or Fields compleatist.

Fred I believe that, some time in the 1970's, more than thirty years after MY LITTLE CHICKADEE was made, the term "high concept" was coined. So, starting in the seventies, a lot of movies with sure-fire ideas became the trend. ("What?", someone, circa 1990 might say, "Arnold Schwarzenegger is being teamed with Danny DeVito? Why, that must be hilarious!") So, clearly, somebody thought the idea of W.C. Fields and Mae West sharing the silver screen would work, and MY LITTLE CHICKADEE remains the ultimate example of both the pitfalls and the merits of High Concept movie-making. Fields and West, both iconic figures, were actually so similar that the audience's loyalties are torn. We watch a West picture to observe Mae West turn the tables on men and we watch a Fields picture to watch Fields flout authority. When Fields and West meet and appear to like each other (he wanting sex and she wanting money) we love them both. Fields gets off one of his most memorable lines as he holds her fingers up to his lips and says, "What symmetrical digits.") She, in turn, throws her false submission at him, letting us know between the lines that she's a woman of steel. So far, so good. Their romance is viewed suspiciously by a character actress who is the perfect foil for both of them: Margaret Hamilton, who, of course, played the Wicked Witch of the West the year before in THE WIZARD OF OZ. Fields and West are married aboard the train by West's con-man friend -- hence, they are not really being married -- and this actor is also the sort of figure who belongs in a movie with either Fields or West. But let's cut to the chase. Both Fields and West have separate moments for the rest of the movie and each of these moments is somewhat minimal. West's scene teaching a classroom of overgrown adolescents seems to be a whitewashing of a bawdy routine from her stage days. It almost makes it. Fields's various encounters with gamblers and a female drunk (who HAS to be Celeste Holm, uncredited, as someone else on this board has noted) are promising, but somehow never really engaging. Thinking about this movie, nevertheless, brings a smile to the face. There are so many little things which, popping into the memory, are funny, that it has to be acknowledged that MY LITTLE CHICKADEE achieved its goal: driving into our minds the idea of the harmony of two comics who'd made audiences howl with laughter in live performance twenty years earlier. It should also be said that the ideal audience for MY LITTLE CHICKADEE is an audience in a darkened movie theatre. Ideally, the year should be the year it was made and the audience should be made up of people who've been anticipating this pairing and would be more than willing to hoot throughout. Has anybody got a time machine?

Holdjerhorses The publicity surrounding Mae West and W.C. Fields "loathing" each other seems to be largely that: publicity.Yes, they each wrote their own lines, as they had for years. Yes, they only had one scene together on camera. Their other scenes were shot separately, consisting of closeups and reaction shots -- then intercut. But that was standard procedure -- especially for West.In her utterly delightful interview with Dick Cavett in 1976 (on YouTube), at the age of 83, West is asked if Fields' drinking was a problem. She says, "Not really. I'd heard about him. So I had it written into my contract that if he was drinking on the set he would be removed. He was fine for the first three weeks. Then I came on set at one o'clock one day and was told he had been drinking. I took a look at him and said, 'Get him outta here.' After that, we didn't have any problems with him."