In his 1937 review of W.C. Fields in "Poppy," Graham Greene wrote "To watch Mr. Fields, as Dickensian as anything Dickens ever wrote, is a form of escape for poor human creatures . . . who are haunted by pity, by fear, by our sense of right and wrong . . . by conscience. . ." This prize of escape is the major thing missing from the dreadful new film "W. C. Fields and Me." It holds up a wax dummy of a character intended to represent the great misanthropic comedian and expects us to feel compassion but only traps us in embarrassment.

"W. C. Fields and Me," which opened yesterday at three theaters, is based on the memoir written by Carlotta Monti, Fields's mistress for the last 14 years of his life. The book, written with Cy Rice, is gushy, foolish and self-serving, which is probably understandable.

To expect it to be anything else, I suppose, would be to look for the definitive analysis of the Cuban missile crisis in a memoir by a White House cook. Yet the movie needn't have been quite as brainless as it is. That took work.

First off, Bob Merrill, who has written either the lyrics or music (sometimes both) for some good Broadway shows, including "New Girl in Town," has supplied a screenplay that originally may have been meant as the outline for a musical. It exhibits a tell-tale disregard for facts and the compulsion to make a dramatically shapeless life fit into a two-act form. The mind that attends to this sort of hack business would cast Raquel Welsh in the title role of "The Life and Loves of Bliss Carman."

Then there's Arthur Hiller, a director who makes intelligent films when the material is right ("Hospital," "The Americanization of Emily") and terrible ones when the writers fail.

Most prominent in the mess is Rod Steiger, who has been got up in a false nose and dyed hair in a way meant to make him look like Fields, which he does (sort of though he reminds me much more of the way Fields's one-time co-star, Mae West, looked in "Myra Breckinridge." The exterior is pure plastic, though occasionally one sees a sign of individual life deep inside the two holes that have been cut out for the eyes.

The film opens in the 1920's in New York, when Fields was already a big Ziegfeld star, and closes with his death in California in 1946, at the age of 67, when he had become one of Hollywood's most celebrated stars. In between these dates "W.C. Fields and Me" attempts to dramatize—with no conviction—the complex, witty actor-writer as if he were one of his own ill-tempered, suspicious heroes with a suddenly discovered heart of gold.

Mr. Steiger reads all of his lines with the monotonous sing-song manner used by third-rate nightclub comics doing Fields imitations. He also speaks most of them out of the corner of his mouth as if he'd had a stroke.

Valerie Perrine, a spectacularly beautiful woman who may also be a good actress, plays Miss Monti, who, in this film anyway, is an unconvincing combination of intelligence, patience, fidelity, sportsmanship and masochism. Perhaps because the visual style of the entire film is more or less mortuous, Jack Cassidy, who plays a flyweight John Barrymore, wears the kind of makeup that makes him look dead several reels before he actually dies.

The movie contains two halfway funny moments: a scene in which we see Fields taking a broom to a swan that has trespassed his Hollywood lawn, and the sight of Baby Harold (based on Baby Leroy, one of Fields's toughest costars) staggering out of his set-side dressing room after Fields has spiked the kid's orange juice with gin.

W.C. FIELDS AND ME, directed by Arthur Hiller; screenplay by Bob Merrill, based on the book by Carlotta Monti with Cy Rice; produced by Jay Weston; director of photography, David M. Walsh; editor, John C. Howard; music, Henry Mancini; distributed by Universal Pictures. Running time: 110 minutes. At the Criterion Theater, Broadway at 45th Street, Baronet Theater, 34th Street near Second Avenue. This film has been rated PG.
W.C. Fields . . . . . Rod Steiger
Carlotta . . . . . Valerie Perrine
Bannerman . . . . . John Marley
John Barrymore . . . . . Jack Cassidy
Melody . . . . . Bernardette Peters
Dockstedter . . . . . Dana Elcar
Zlegfeld . . . . . Paul Stewart
Ludwig . . . . . Billy Barty
La Cava . . . . . Allan Arbus
Chasen . . . . . Milt Kamen
Gene Fowler . . . . . Louis Zorich
Claude . . . . . Andrew Parks
Edward . . . . . Paul Mantee