The Bank Dick

The Bank Dick
November 29, 1940
Universal
Comedy
DVD
C-

Not only my least favorite W.C. Fields movie, but my least favorite movie in my collection so far.  As before, Fields is a bumbling husband and father who is saved by a deus ex machina at the end.  (Well, more like three or four.)  The movie is very unfocused, with a subplot about Fields as a film director forgotten for about an hour.  All the imagination seems to have gone into the names: the Sousé (accent gravamen over the E) family, Mackley Q. Greene, Og Oggilby, J. Frothingham Waterbury, Miss Plupp, A. Pismo Clam, and Filthy McNasty.  (I didn't say they were funny names.)  I might've gone with a C, but there's gratuitous racism.  (It can't be excused, as that in You Can't Cheat an Honest Man might be.  And, yes, I'm ignoring gratuitous sexism for the most part.)  Even Franklin Pangborn (implausibly cast as a husband and father) can't save his scenes.  And it was odd to see Shemp Howard in a straight-man role-- running the bar with the censor-bait name of "Black Pussy Cafe"-- especially when there are Stooge-like sound effects underlining how unfunny the slapstick is here.  I suggest you skip, and I don't mean in the exercise sense.

Cora Witherspoon, who was in The Women, plays Fields's wife.  Evelyn Del Rio, who portrays his younger daughter, was the crying girl in Honest Man.  Una Merkel plays his elder daughter, and would soon be in The Road to Zanzibar.  This time Grady Sutton is his potential son-in-law, and main victim.  William J. O'Brien was in A Night at the Opera, Vangie Beilby in A Day at the Races.  Russell Hicks and Dick Purcell were in Follow the Fleet.  Fay Adler, Charles Hart, and George Moran were in My Little Chickadee.   Pat West was the warden in His Girl Friday.

Joseph North was a butler in in Thank You, Jeeves! as well, but would play a secretary in Citizen Kane.  Jack Gargan was in The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, and would also appear in Kane.  William Alston, Eddie Coke, Monty Ford, and Sam Rice are in Kane as well.  Bill Wolfe was in some earlier Fields movies and would go on to Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, as would Jack Roper and Emma Tansey.  This is the last and possibly most forgettable of Jan Duggan's appearances in Fields movies, but she would have a role in The Big Store, which features Al Hill.

We are not amused.