The Pool Caper

W.C. Fields makes an appearance at the start of Hollywood Capers, a 1935 Warner Bros. cartoon directed by Jack King.



Fields, or “Mr. Seal” as a security guard calls him here, goes to the entrance of the “Warmer Brothers Studio.” (The mouth movements don’t match the dialogue).



The scene carries on. The ersatz Fields hands his walking-stick-on-a-wheel to the security guard, puts his hat on the guard’s head and his cigar in the guard’s mouth.



Fields then takes an expandable cane out of his pocket, aims it like a pool cue and hits the ashes off his cigar.



He puts the cane back in his pocket, retrieves his hat and cigar, and strolls through the studio entrance.



The security guard scratches his head to end the scene.



The guard was probably puzzled about whether that was supposed to be a gag. Fields did have a very funny act with a trick pool table he used in vaudeville. He began his film career with the short Pool Sharks in 1915 and included a pool routine in the 1934 feature Six of a Kind, so audiences watching this cartoon would be familiar with Fields handling a pool cue.

The routine is completely self-contained and has nothing to do with anything else in the cartoon. The story is all over the place. First, it’s a celebrity caricature cartoon. Then it switches to the shooting of a film starring Leon Schlesinger’s version of “Our Gang.” A little more than half-way through, it switches to a vanquish-Frankenstein’s-monster cartoon (a real monster in a film studio??) as Little Kitty and the rest of the Gang disappear.

The tune under the Fields scene is Benee Russell’s I Saw a Robin from the 1935 Warners feature Miss Pacific Fleet. As usual, musical director Norman Spencer double-times the melody during the good guy vs. bad guy scenes toward the end of the cartoon.

Writers didn’t get screen credit at Warners yet, but Tedd Pierce and Bugs Hardaway have their names inscribed on one of the backgrounds, so it’s very possible they contributed to the proceedings.