W.C. Fields’ appearance in Song of the Open Road (1944) is a brief cameo, which is all he was being hired for towards the end of his career. Jane Powell, in her first movie, plays a child star who flees her controlling mother and runs off to join the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps, one of FDR’s Depression Era programs). She wants to be an ordinary girl, doing ordinary, useful work. At various points she seeks help on the job from her old Hollywood friends, and this is how she comes to call upon W.C. Fields, who helps her pick oranges, juggling a few along the way, and exchanges some barbs with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.
(Travalanche) 