SOURCE: "W.C. Fields," in The New Statesman and Nation, Vol. XXXIII, No. 828, January 4, 1947, p. 8.

In the following essay, Priestly eulogizes Fields.

So now there is another cold gap, for W. C. Fields is dead. I wrote the rough treatment of a film for him once—and kept my family all winter in Arizona on the proceeds (those were the days)—but the film was never made, chiefly, I think, because even then Fields could no longer sustain a leading rôle. It was a story about an itinerant piano tuner wandering round the ranches in the South-West, and had, I think, some good Fieldsian situations in it. In one of them Fields, in despair and after some desperate bragging, decides to get tough and hold up a car, but the car he chooses is full of old Western sharpshooters on their way to a rodeo and delighted...