Appreciation …

… Remembering the Great Man | George Hunka. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The time is ripe for a critical reassessment of Fields’ career, which hasn’t been attempted since William K. Everson’s 1967 The Art of W.C. Fields. Just this month, Taylor Trade Publishing reissuedW.C. Fields by Himself, a 1973 collection of essays, ephemera, and letters by Fields and edited by his grandson, Ronald J. Fields (I devoured this book when it was first published), and last October Universal issued a five-DVD set, the W.C. Fields Comedy Essentials Collection, which collects 18 of Fields’ films from Paramount and Universal, most of them classics (among which I would place You’re Telling Me, The Man on the Flying Trapeze, and It’s a Gift, an unintended trilogy of small-town America satires) and all of them necessary to an understanding of his career. In addition, many of Fields’ silent features, unavailable for years and some previously considered lost, have finally been unearthed and are being restored and distributed