The Bank Dick, 1940

This is an all-time classic comedy starring the great W. C. Fields his first solo starring role in a Universal Pictures film. Directed by Edward F. Cline, the film is only a little over an hour long. It is one of his very best and funniest films originally titled The Great Man, and is filled with Fields' brand of silliness and buffoonery.
The worst thing one can do with a Fields movie, for that matter with the Marx brothers movie is to analyze it. The Bank Dick satirizes and skewers film-making, family life and marriage, banking practices, and small-town behavior, in a series of short sketches. W. C. Fields plays the lead comic role, a penultimate characterization of a bullied, unemployed drunk who despises the members of his aggravating family and is talented only at telling (and believing) tall tales and imbibing alcohol at the Black Pussy Cat Cafe. [The name of the cafe, originally the Black Pussy Cafe and Snack Bar, offended Hollywood's censorship agency - the Breen Office. Even the film's title can be interpreted with two meanings, although 'dick' means detective. The film was released as The Bank Detective in the UK.] Inadvertently, the elbow-bending, gin-soaked lush trundles into 'directing' a film for a brief time, and is credited with capturing a bank robber and being a hero.
After being rewarded with the job of bank guard ('dick') to prevent future holdups, he involves his prospective son-in-law as a temporary embezzler when suckered by a con salesman to embezzle bank funds to finance a purchase of Beefsteak Mines stock - a fly-by-night mining enterprise. Mostly drunk throughout the film, he also holds off an inquisitive and persistent bank examiner with a Mickey Finn. In the end, he is rewarded for accidentally capturing another bank robber, and also given a lucrative contract for his 'improvised' screenplay. It climaxes with one of the greatest slapstick, getaway car chase sequences in film history (a throw-back to Mack Sennett days - director Cline had been an actor in Sennett's Keystone Kops). The car chase has been imitated in numerous films, including Bogdanovich's What's Up, Doc (1972).
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Egbert Sousè (pronounced "Sou-zay" with an "accent grave over the e," something carefully explained) (W. C. Fields), a hapless, henpecked husband and the unemployed town drunk, lives with his shrewish, nagging, hypercritical wife Agatha (Cora Witherspoon) and annoying family in the sleepy town of Lompoc, California. [The town's name is consistently mis-pronounced in the film.] Agatha insists that her obnoxious mother Mrs. Hermisillo Brunch (Jessie Ralph) live with the family that also includes two dreadful daughters.

In one of the film's first lines during a breakfast scene (accompanied by a sick-sounding trumpet playing There's No Place Like Home,) his grouchy mother-in-law complains to Agatha about an off-screen Egbert: "What's he up to now?" She criticizes Egbert's bad habits, threatening to move out and "go on the county" welfare instead, while complaining about her "lingering death":

Well, I bet you anything he's smoking up in his room again. Now this time, Agatha, you've got to just tell him to stop. Now, it's his smoking gave me asthma...If he don't (quit), I'm goin' on the county...Imagine a man trying to take care of his family, by going to theatre bank lines, working puzzle contests, and suggesting slogans...

Eldest daughter Myrtle (Una Merkel) is also thoroughly humiliated and embarrassed by her father: "My Sunday School teacher, Mr. Stackhouse, told me that he saw my father coming out of a saloon the other day and that Dad was smoking a pipe." The youngest daughter is bratty Elsie Mae Adele Brunch Sousè (Evelyn Del Rio). [Fields' two real-life sisters were named Elsie May and Adel.]

Mrs. Brunch complains further:

Smoking and drinking, and reading those infernal detective stories. The house just smells of liquor and smoke. There he goes again, down to the saloon to read that silly Detective Magazine. (Egbert appears from upstairs, deftly swallows his cigarette, and snatches his Detective Magazine from Elsie Mae. After she kicks him in the shin, he pops her on the head. She beans him with a hurled bottle of ketchup.) ...Imagine a man who takes money out of a child's piggy bank and puts in IOU's.

Flighty Myrtle is lovesick - engaged to marry the town fool, a dim-witted bank clerk named Og Oggilby (Grady Sutton). On his front porch, when Sousè is introduced to Myrtle's fiancee Og, he quips:

Og Oggilby. Sounds like a bubble in a bathtub.

On his way through town, Egbert offers his helpful advice to a chauffeur who is toiling over his stalled limousine. Egbert asks for a shifting spanner or monkey wrench and the sweet old lady in the back seat persuades her surly driver to let him help. With a single turn of a nut on the motor, the entire engine immediately drops out onto the ground. With a half-hearted apology, a sheepish Egbert departs and continues his walk to the bar. (Hours later, when Egbert happens to pass that way again, the chauffeur is still working to repair the damage.)
I could go on and on with hilarious moments in this movie. Let me leave you the pleasure of fully savoring the impossible reincarnation of Marx brothers in a single edition that has a tag,- WC Fields. Fields wrote the original screenplay, but credits himself with the nom de plume of Mahatma Kane Jeeves (a play on the phrase often heard in English drawing-room comedies: 'My hat, my cane, Jeeves' He is inimitable as he is at his best here.
The ramshackle film, (tied with Paramount's It's A Gift (1934)), his next-to-last major film role (he last appeared in Cline's Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941)), He was given considerable creative control over this film's script, direction and editing by Universal Pictures, unlike what would happen to him a year later.
benny