Gateway Cinephiles

3-Minute Intro: The Bank Dick

Screened: February 25, 2008
Format: DVD - Universal (2004)
Selected By: Roland

To say that Edward Cline’s 1940 absurdist comedy The Bank Dick is actor W.C. Fields’ best film is a bit misleading. Fields didn’t so much make movies as he strung together surreal, subversive comedy sketches into feature-length productions. That an actor such as Fields—or the indelible persona that he created—emerged from early twentieth century Hollywood and ascended to pop culture stardom is something of a minor miracle. Fields’ films crack and fizz with screwball contempt for everything that middle class America purported to value: marriage, children, pets, fidelity, modesty, thrift, and especially temperance. Fields’ defied the ethics codes of Hollywood censors and created hallucinatory comic microcosms where everyone is loathsome or foolish, and yet everything turns out happily in the end.

Unsurprisingly, given his flair for physical stunts and his skewering of American Puritanism, Fields first made his name in Vaudeville, where he toured internationally as a comedian and world-class juggler. He successfully moved to silent and then sound films at Paramount, although his career stalled in the mid-1930s due to his stubborn on-set temperament and alcohol-related health problems. Subsequent success as a radio comedian energized him for a film comeback at Universal, where he made The Bank Dick. Fields often wrote his own screenplays, and he was notorious for his loathing of studio interference. The misanthropic losers that he portrayed were beloved by audiences, but establishment Hollywood was often baffled by the stream-of-consciousness zaniness of his material.

The Bank Dick, like much of Fields’ work, is an absolute mess in terms of story or construction. Of course, the film has no interest in following the pattern of a typical narrative comedy. Fields’ Egbert Sousé stumbles through one ludicrous sequence after another, the scenes held together with the thinnest of connections—or none at all. Egbert is a miserable, horrible man, yet The Bank Dick succeeds as comedy due to the empathy Fields evokes. For our amusement he offers up his frustration with a bothersome world and a huckster’s glee at small victories. Fields’ reputation experienced a revival in the 1960s, but today his taste for black absurdism and repugnant characters probably finds its closest kin is the surreal animated comedies of the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim.