Lompoc, California. Egbert Sousé is an alcoholic slob who sepnds his days drinking at a bar, much the annoyance of his wife, mother-in-law and two daughters. One day, two bank robbers argue over their spoils, one gets knocked off by the other, and Sousé falls from a bench on the former, and thus the police mistakenly think he caught the criminal. Sousé is given the job of a bank guard. He persuades his daughter's boyfriend, Og, a bank clerk, to take 500$ away from the bank and invest into stocks of a minning company, but its representative escapes with the money. Sousé tries to stop an auditor from checking the bank deposits by getting him drugged, while Og tries to get his own money to return the lost cash to the bank. Luckily, the minning company strikes a fortune, and Og is saved. The second bank robber shows up, steals the money and orders Sousé to drive the car to safety, but gets caught. Sousé is thus a double hero, and gets rich when a producer buys off the rights to make a movie out of his story.
Included in Roger Ebert's Great Movies List, "The Bank Dick" is a comedy that is today more respected than enjoyed, yet still shows signs of comic brilliance from the 'golden age' of Hollywood even among outsiders like these. Its star W.C. Fields is an 'apocryphal comedian'—at his worst, he is a slob, an alcoholic who sometimes mumbles so much that half of his sentences are intelligible, and several of his heavy handed mannerisms are strange; yet at his best, he manages to be wonderfully cynical and sarcastic, and exaggerates his grouchy persona to such an extent that it becomes charming. The viewers will either like him or not in the sequence where his character Sousé enters a bar and asks the bartender if he was there yesterday and spent 20$ for drinks, and as the bartender confirms it, Sousé says: "Oh boy, what a load that is off my mind! I thought I'd lost it!" "The Bank Dick" is a surprisingly simple and direct comedy, without any more complicated or intricate planning, yet it works anyway, whereas it abounds with plenty of unexpected physical comedy and slapstick. In one sequence, a driver is trying to fix a broken car on the street, and so Sousé takes the monkey wrench to help him, rotates a nut loose, but the engine just unexpectedly falls down from the car on the ground. In another, Sousé is talking on the telephone, and reaches for some grapes on the table behind, but just accidentally grabs one of the plastic marbles from a woman's hat situated nearby, as the sound of his broken tooth can be heard as he bites it. The car chase in the finale is also creative at times, such as when a car drives over a trench just as the workers lowered their mattocks at the ground, in a domino effect, but the last worker swings his mattock up again, it gets stuck on the car and catapults him inside the vehicle. The film is basically just a collection of sketches without a real narrative, yet its punchlines and jokes still work on their own, even if they were presented just isolated.
Grade:+++
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