"W. C. Fields, with wife, mother-in-law, child, daughter, and son-in-law, played by the wonderful Grady Sutton. All this is pure enjoyment. When were movies ever more alive than in the thirties, when the great performers from the musical and vaudeville stage entered films? W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Mae West, Maurice Chevalier, Fred Astaire, Marie Dressler, Mickey Rooney, and Judy Garland, among so many others. They were the real authors of their films, needing little help from their directors. American films began with audiences wanting to see performers, not directors, and this, perhaps, continues to separate American films from European films, but we’re lucky to have both, and who’s to say which is really better."

"I wish young actors and actresses were better versed in the work of Fields, Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and even lower-brow comics like the Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, Jerry Lewis. Actors can partly cultivate a sense of humor from observing and mimicking our forebears. W. C. Fields makes me laugh more than any other film actor. His performances seem effortless, as if Fields is just doing Fields, but he deserves more credit than that. He constructed and honed his character over a twenty-year stage career. That character, known in The Bank Dick as Egbert Sousé, is the cinematic progenitor of a comic archetype: the lazy, drunken misanthrope. Fields wasn’t the innovator that Chaplin or Keaton was, of course, and in fact, his movies are not great. They’re flimsy vehicles for his routines. But I’ve also come to believe that’s part of the joke. “Can you believe they made a whole movie about this guy?” The Bank Dick also features several great comic character actors, such as Franklin Pangborn, Grady Sutton (as Og Oggilby), and Shemp Howard. I wanted to put Contempt on my list but Godard never put Shemp in a movie, know what I’m saying?"