Godfrey Daniels
When W.C. Fields says this I had no idea what that meant until I looked it up. Apparently it's his way of saying 'g*ddamn' without saying it. A lot of the words in this movie I didn't totally understand.
shareThe real phrase is “Godfrey Daniel.” Yes, Fields used his own phrases to work around the censors. If you think something might be filthy in Fields movie, it is. For example, later in Chickadee, a Native American character asks Fields, a propos of Mae West, “Big Chief gottum new squaw?” Fields replies, “New is right [pause, two, three]. She hasn’t been unwrapped yet.” In his classic, The Bank Dick (here again, think dirty), he takes a prissy bank examiner to a watering hole named The Black Pussy Saloon (again, dirty). The examiner asks if it’s okay to pull a window shade closed. W.C. replies, “This is a regular joint. You can pull anything you want here.” Fields’ “bomb” word was “drat,” as in, “Oh, drat!” He usually spoke it quietly, as a man seeing his inevitable death only two inches away. You can guess what “drat” meant.
Fields and West each wrote their own lines for Chickadee, and they hated each other. Mae’s popularity was falling and the studio forced her into the movie with Fields to build her back up. By the way, there was no shortness of single-entendres off-camera. West walked around saying, “Bill’s cute—too god-damned cute,” and Fields payed the stage hands to shout, “Show us your tits, Mae,” whenever she walked by.