Overrated and overhyped

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

It's an excellent film in spite of the facts that they disliked each other but were professionals on camera. A legendary pairing up of 2 screen icons. Funniest "gags" included: Their meeting on the train and fake marriage. Mae West as a schoolteacher teaching "good little boys how to be real good". The "marriage" is never "consumated" and she puts a goat in the bed! (Not as risqué as it sounds.) Many plot ideas used here were recycled in several newer comic westerns, including "Paleface", "The Harvey Girls" and "The Shakiest Gun in the West". Main plot: Mae West has to marry the no-good gambler (Fields) so she can become respectable and not get run out of town by Margret Hamilton. There is also a masked "kissing bandit" and gun-play. (Mae West picks off "them Indians" like she's in a shootin' gallery.) Both stars were well past their prime and most noticeably W.C. Fields. Stunt doubles used throughout. Her best film was actually "I'm No Angel" and his best was either "It's a Gift" or "The Bank Dick", depending on your personal taste. A very clever exchange of signature "lines" at the very end of the movie between Mae West and W.C. Fields. "Drat"!

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.

An Old West comedy that doesn't make a lot of sense, "My Little Chickadee" is mostly a cinematic vehicle for the talents of its two stars: Mae West and W.C. Fields.Mae, all decked out in flowery glad rags, does her usual shtick, as she rolls her eyes, smiles mischievously, and walks in the slinky, suggestive manner that she's known for. I love it. She doesn't "act" so much as she projects her own unique on-stage persona. In this film she sings only one song: "Willie Of The Valley". It's okay, but I could have wished for a song more suitable to her wonderfully bawdy public image.Wearing a high top hat and white gloves, and with that big nose and eccentric way of speaking, W.C. Fields plays Cuthbert J. Twillie, a blustery, flamboyant older man who uses big words to impress, and devious tricks to hoodwink. He's not seriously criminal, just a good-natured, booze-loving flimflam man trying to get along in life as best he knows how. Sometimes he succeeds, sometimes not. Fields is just as unique as Mae West. And his comedic routine is straight out of vaudeville.The script's dialogue contains lines that highlight the humor of Fields, like when he tries to impress Flower Belle (Mae West): "The days of chivalry are not over. I've been worried about you my little peach fuzz. Have you been loitering somewhere? ... You are the epitome of erudition, the double superlative ...". His flowery metaphors sometimes get on Flower Belle's nerves, like when he says to her: "I climb the ladder of love to reach for the stars". She snaps back: "I'm in no mood for astronomy".For all his bluster, Twillie is actually the weaker of the two characters. It's Flower Belle who uses a pistol to knock off villainous Indians, and Twillie whose use of a kid's slingshot backfires.In this story, Margaret Hamilton, in her best witch voice, plays a histrionic busybody, in a support role.This is a film that will appeal mostly to fans of Fields and/or West. I think the film probably showcases Fields' talents a little better than those of West. What hurt this film is the real-life villainous Production Code which tried to water down the bawdy dialogue. As a result, both the plot and some of the dialogue come across as flat. Had the self-righteous censors left the scriptwriters alone, "My Little Chickadee" could have really sizzled.

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?