The Bank Dick (1940)

Disturbing yet enthralling

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

W. C. Fields dominates this film. For such a basically rotten guy, we still sympathize with him because he is the head of a dysfunctional, mean spirited family. Of course, he's no gem himself, smoking, drinking, carrying on in front of young women. His daughter wants to marry a guy named Og Ogilby (Fields was a master at creating the most ridiculous names for his characters). The boy has little to offer, working in a bank for very little. The story evolves around a bank robbery where Fields (whose name is Souse with the "e" pronounced so he doesn't have the name of a perennial drunk). Fields accidentally apprehends some bank robbers and is rewarded with a job as a band guard. He talks Og into embezzling money and investing it in a gold mine so he can be rich enough to marry his daughter. Things take many turns. The important thing is Fields is on the screen continuously, not having to share time with other stars. Will he land on his feet?

Happy to say I found this film a lot more amusing than "It's A Gift", reputed to be W.C. Fields' funniest. Made six years later than the earlier film, it's as if Fields realized that the repetitive nature of the bits in 'Gift' tended to wear the viewer out, whereas he presented each of his humorous situations here just once and moved the viewer on to the next. Yet at the same time he recycled some of the ideas from the 1934 flick, like the pronunciation of his last name (accent grave over the e, Souse/Bissonette), the irritable wife and a willingness to beat his kid to prove how much he loved him or her. I don't know if these themes were staples of his pictures because I haven't seen enough of them, so I guess I'll find out in due course.If you stay attentive to the opening credits you'll see one for Screenplay by Mahatma Kane Jeeves. Watching this film on Turner Classics and hosted by moderator Ben Mankiewicz, the origin of the name was explained by Fields' granddaughter, Dr. Harriet Fields. It was derived from one of Fields' sayings when he was getting ready to perform. He would ask for 'My hat, my cane and my shoes'. So a clever play on words, and as a word-smith, Fields sprinkles his story liberally with uncommon words like moon calf and jabbernowl. But he really caught my attention with a line that Hitchcock wound up using in his 1945 picture "Spellbound" when Ingrid Bergman says to Gregory Peck - "Professor, you're suffering from mogo on the go-go". However the phrase used here was 'mogo on the ga-go-go'.Anyway, I found the picture to be highly entertaining, and even a bit risqué at times, Fields' caricature of being a souse notwithstanding. Every time the Black Pussy Cat Café came into view I had to wonder what was on Fields' mind, other than ordering up a depth bomb to wet his whistle. Similarly I would never had considered his proboscis to be an 'adsatitious excrescious', and by that time I thought he might have been making it all up as he went.Above all, make sure you stick around for the well choreographed car chase near the end of the film. It reminded me a lot of the painstaking choreography Chaplin put into some of his pictures. The ditch diggers in particular stayed right on cue for their bit, and the near misses with the dueling road cars was epic timing at it's best. Something you take for granted today but back in the Forties I imagine it was quite the feat. With all that, one's best take away from the picture might well be the advice Egbert Souse offered his soon to be son-in-law on preparing for the future, even if it was offered in convoluted Fieldsian double talk - 'Don't wait too long in life'.

W.C. Fields was invaluable as a comedian simply because he doesn't fit. Like Groucho or The Tramp or Mae West or Buster Keaton's stone face, Fields was such a strong personality that any situation or plot was simply an excuse to let him loose and see what kind of damage he could do.The first time that I saw Fields was in a bizarre 1933 short called The Fatal Glass of Beer. That was the one where he goes to the door of his snowbound cabin and proclaims "And it ain't a fit night out for man nor beast." Then is rewarded with a face-full of fake snow. That's also the one where he utters the immortal words "I think I'll go milk an Elk." From there, I set out to see everything of Fields that I could get my hands on. I have noticed an interesting thing: In nearly every film, in nearly every short film, he always plays the same character, the same irascible, mean-spirited little man who hates children and dogs and whose entire existence is the endless pursuit of the drink and the misadventure therein. The experience is something akin to hanging out with the bad kids at school, you can see them getting away with doing bad stuff but it is a fun journey even if you only sit on the sidelines.Of his features, The Bank Dick is my favorite. He wrote the screenplay himself but the credit went under his pseudonym Mahatma Kane Jeeves (say that name out loud slowly). Like most of the great comedians of the time, he was given control over his own project but still had to battle the Hays office over content. For instance, the Black Pussy Cat Cafe was written in the original script as The Black Pussy Cafe and Snack Bar. Joe Breen and the Hays office changed the name even though somehow the film's title remained.He plays henpecked Egbert Sousé, his usual lecherous drunk who accidentally foils a bank robbery and is offered a job as the bank's guard. A light bulb goes off in his brain to employ his good-for-nothing future son-in-law in an embezzlement scheme to siphon bank funds into a fly-by-night mining enterprise. From there, it is just one damn thing after another. The movie has no real structure and in any other comedy that would be a problem but for Fields it's just a series of set ups and comic pay-offs that have no real connection. Like The Marx Brothers, the plot is more or less an afterthought. The problem in describing Fields is that he can't really be described in words, he's an experience, not an explanation.The persona that Fields created has, today, fallen out of favor. After a brief revival in the 70s, the generation that followed has yet to discover him and I don't think they ever will. Today, in these politically correct times, Fields drunk act doesn't fit. We take alcoholism seriously and a man whose happy pursuit of the sauce frames his very existence doesn't seem in step with the times. But for me, I am bound to see comedy for what it is. If is makes me laugh, it's not my business whether it's politically correct or not. That's why Hollywood had such a problem with Fields, he didn't fit the good-natured mold they wanted to fashion for him.

What a great chance to thrill to the adventures of a true American hero, Egbert Souse ("Soo- say", accent gravamen over the "e", please). Glory in Egbert's acrobatic family as they talk and stuff their mouths at the same time, while seated around a loving breakfast table. Catch little Elsie Mae's affectionate tribute to her dad, a billiard ball at his head, while he returns her love with a raised flowerpot. See him rescue a movie set from the clutches of a crazed downtown Lompoc ("Lom-pock", please). But most of all, glory in Egbert's fearless capture of an inert bank bandit, catapulting our hero up the ladder of success, where among other feats, he alertly disarms a maddened 11-year old cowboy. With our Egbert, the thrills just keep coming.But our hero is nothing if not versatile. Follow his genius for threading through the mysterious world of high finance. Learn from his expert use of liquid treats in greasing the wheels of finance, where he greases and greases and greases. Note how quickly he turns facts and figures into the sheer poetry of "beer beneath an arboreal dell". And finally, thrill to his NASCAR skills in maneuvering a 1930's flivver to the background demands of a Hollywood projection screen. Truly, a man for all seasons.But more importantly, one heckuva funny movie.