The Bank Dick
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The Bank Dick
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1992.
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The Bank Dick, released as The Bank Detective in the United Kingdom, is a 1940 American comedy film starring W.C. Fields. Set in Lompoc, California, Fields plays Egbert Sousé who accidentally thwarts a bank robbery and ends up a bank security guard as a result. The character is a drunk who must repeatedly remind people in exasperation that his name is pronounced "Sousé—accent grave over the 'e'!", because people keep calling him "Souse", slang for drunkard. In addition to bank and family scenes, it features Fields pretending to be a film director and ends in a chaotic car chase. The Bank Dick is considered a classic of his work, incorporating his usual persona as a drunken henpecked husband with a shrewish wife, disapproving mother-in-law, and savage children.
The film was written by Fields, using the alias "Mahatma Kane Jeeves", derived from the Broadway drawing-room comedy cliche, "My hat, my cane, Jeeves!", and directed by Edward F. Cline.
Why It Rocks
- Perhaps more than any other film comedian in the early days of movies (including the greats such as Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy), W.C. Fields is an acquired taste. He was never traditionally endearing. He embodied all the vices of modern man, and may have been even more likable because of it. His absurdist brand of humor, at once dry and surreal, endures for the simple reason that the movies bear up under repeated viewings; in fact, it's almost a necessity to watch them over and over, if only to figure out why they're so funny.
- Along with his 1934-35 masterpieces, this film presents Fields at full strength. It’s a much zanier comedy than his earlier films, which were more traditional domestic or situational comedies.
- The concept of an unemployed layabout replacing a drunk movie director on a location shoot in his hometown of Lompoc, California before chance lands him in the job of bank detective is a very unique concept, with a lot of ripe humor to balance things out, including the running gag where Egbert Souse constantly has to remind people his name's pronounced "Sousé" - accent grave over the e.
- The film satirizes and skewers film-making, family life and marriage, banking practices, and small-town behavior, in a series of short sketches. After the title character ends up becoming a bank detective, the movie becomes a riff on the comic possibilities of his new-found notoriety, with the film making full use of a lot of the possibilities.
- Aside from W.C. Fields as a penultimate characterization of a bullied, unemployed drunklead, the supporting cast includes future Stooge Shemp Howard as the bartender at Fields' regular haunt, The Black Pussy, and Preston Sturges regular Franklin Pangborn as bank examiner J. Pinkerton Snoopington, just to name a few.
- The film's climax contains one of the greatest slapstick, getaway car chase sequences in film history, which would then be imitated in numerous films.