NFR Project: 'The Bank Dick' (1940)

 

NFR Project: ‘The Bank Dick’

Dir: Edward F. Cline, Ralph Cader

Scr: Mahatma Kane Jeeves aka W.C. Fields, Richard A. Carroll

Pho: Milton R. Krasner

Ed: Arthur Hilton

Premiere: Nov. 29, 1940

73 min.

W.C. Fields (1880-1946) was a juggler, first and foremost. (For a brief replication of some of his old juggling tricks, see The Man on the Flying Trapeze [1935]). He made his reputation as a “tramp” juggler, a downscale clown who didn’t speak. He moved on to other ideas, incorporating a trick billiard table into a classic vaudeville pool-hall routine, then moved on to skewering golf on Broadway in variety revues.

The sarcastic dialogue came later. He began to comment on what he was doing, and on the state of things in general. His sketches were wildly popular, and he began to drift into film work during the late silent era.

But it was, significantly, working in sound that made his career. On film, he usually played a male martyr – a henpecked man who snuck smokes, drinks, and peeks at the Police Gazette when not under his wife’s baleful gaze. In this film, he is Egbert Sous-say (read”Souse”), and his harridan wife, her mother, and their youngest daughter despise him. Only his oldest daughter (Una Merkel) loves and appreciates him.

Fields holds everything in contempt – home, family, fame, fortune. He knows that the ways of the world are not his, and longs constantly to float through the day on a gentle tide of alcohol. He commiserates with himself at the Black Pussy Cat Café (which all the characters refer to pointedly as the “Black Pussy Café”. The great Shemp Howard, soon to rejoin the Three Stooges, is the bartender)

Fields is visibly ailing in this film, genuinely an alcoholic who was drinking himself to death. His countenance is swollen, and his body is more rotund. He ambles through town aimlessly and is called upon, oddly, to take over the direction of a film when its director shows up drunk. For no particular reason, he abandons the shoot.and accidentally captures a bank robber, leading to his being nominated for a job as the bank’s guard. This he accepts, cautiously.

In the meantime, he falls for a swindler who wants to sell him worthless mine stocks. Fields convinces his daughter’s chinless boyfriend (the inimitable Grady Sutton), a bank clerk, to embezzle $500 to pay for it. Suddenly, the bank examiner (Franklin Pangborn) shows up, and Egbert has to do everything he can think of to dissuade him from examining the books.

Then, it turns out that the stock certificates are valuable. The day is saved – but then suddenly, as was usually the case with a Fields ending, a rather arbitrary last-second robbery takes place, and culminates in a comical car chase. Fields gets the $5,000 reward, cashes in his stock, and lands a $10,000 contract with the movie company. Resplendent in formal wear, he leaves his family in their mansion and walks back to the Black Pussy Café.

Fields has lots of fun abusing the proprieties. He mutters out of the side of his mouth at everyone, unable to assert himself until the deux-ex-machina chicanery of the happy ending he imposes on himself – a bit of wish fulfillment many can identify with. He has no endearing qualities. He suspects the world is out to get him, and he is right. Egbert could just have easily wound up dead, or a bum. He is fortune’s fool, a very intelligent and articulate and skeptical fool indeed.

Fields’ lack of logic in what takes place in what is more or less a plot in his film is a hallmark of his consistently breaking the fourth wall in his films – in The Fatal Glass of Beer, for instance, and in his last feature, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. He has no respect for continuity, internal logic, finesse. He is there, he delivers the gags, and moves on. If you don’t like it, too bad.

This bristling approach to comedy makes him an acquired taste. You have to be able to share in his sense that everything was a sham, and that that best you can be is somewhat benumbed to it all. Oddly, this cynical posture underscores the heartache that must have prompted him to pick up the comic cudgel in the first place.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Commandment Keeper Church, Beaufort South Carolina (March 1940).