My Little Chickadee

My Little Chickadee (1940)

It's the lafftime of a lifetime ! . . as "Wild Bill" Fields tries to tame the West!

On her way by stagecoach to visit relatives out west, Flower Belle Lee is held up by a masked bandit who also takes the coach's shipment of gold. When he abducts Flower Belle and they arrive in town, Flower Belle is suspected of being in collusion with the bandit.

Date of release
1940-02-09
TMDB
6.4 / 10 (37)
Runtime
1h 23m
Genres
Comedy, Western
Director
Edward F. Cline

Casting

Interesting facts

My Little Chickadee is a 1940 American comedy-western film starring Mae West and W. C. Fields, featuring Joseph Calleia, Ruth Donnelly, Margaret Hamilton, Donald Meek, Willard Robertson, Dick Foran, William B. Davidson, and Addison Richards, and released by Universal Pictures. It was directed by Edward F. Cline and the music was written by Ben Oakland and Frank Skinner.

Production notes

Shooting on My Little Chickadee was completed in January 1940. West and Fields received joint screenplay credit. However, West later claimed that she wrote most of the film and that Fields only wrote some of the scenes, such as the bar scene, and some dialogue and was given joint credit as an inducement to "straighten himself up and finish the picture".

Fields had starred in a series of comedies for Paramount in the 1930s. My Little Chickadee was West's first screen performance since Every Day's a Holiday (1937) for Paramount Pictures. This was Fields's second film for Universal, and West's only film for Universal. It was also the last successful film of West's career; her three subsequent films all failed at the box office.

My Little Chickadee was the third of five films starring Fields and directed by Edward F. Cline, an ex-Keystone Cop. The others were Million Dollar Legs (1932), You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1939), The Bank Dick (1940), and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941).

The railroad scenes were filmed on the Sierra Railroad in Tuolumne County, California.

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