by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I broke out volume 1 of
Universal’s two boxed sets of films by W. C. Fields — the one I paid a bit too
much for at Amazon.com to get the 1932 movie International House. Between them the two boxes contain 10 films, six
made at Paramount between 1932 and 1936 and the four Fields actually made at
Universal (Charles is a bit resentful at the way Universal, who acquired these
films from MCA-TV after Universal and MCA merged in 1962, Paramount having
previously sold its entire library of sound films from 1928 to 1949 to MCA-TV
in the 1950’s, has slapped their modern logo on movies they had nothing to do with making). After Paramount
fired Fields, Mae West and Marlene Dietrich in 1938 (for different reasons:
Fields because his age and alcoholism were leading to long bouts with ill
health during which stand-ins and doubles had to fill in for him; West because
neither the quality nor popularity of her films had recovered from the Legion
of Decency’s campaign in 1934 and the strict enforcement of the Production Code
that resulted; Dietrich because a series of quirky but unpopular films had put
her on Harry Brandt’s infamous “Box-Office Poison” list alongside Greta Garbo,
Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn and Fred Astaire), Universal signed all of
them and gave Fields the film You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Bergen and
Fields had become a popular team on Bergen’s radio show but the chemistry
didn’t work on film — You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man was a reasonably amusing film but not the laugh-riot
it could have been and not the richer, deeper, more pathos-ridden work Fields
had had in mind when he’d written the original story (under his usual pen-name,
“Charles Bogle”).
Then Fields did My Little Chickadee with Mae West — the script was credited to both of
them but in 1969 West told Life
magazine that she’d written all of it except for one scene in a bar (and it was
so clearly a parody of The Girl of the Golden West that if it had another author, it was David Belasco)
— and after that Universal finally gave Fields near-total control of his movies
and ended up with two masterpieces, The Bank Dick (1940) and Never Give a Sucker an Even
Break (1941). The Bank Dick, the film Charles and I watched two nights ago, is
the last of Fields’ henpecked-husband movies, in which the hell his nice
suburban house (with the typical ghastly floral wallpaper of the period — it
looks a little better than a PRC
set, but not much) has become from the three generations of his family sharing
it with him is vividly dramatized by an out-of-tune trumpet soloist playing
“Home, Sweet Home” every time it’s introduced on screen. Fields plays Egbert
Sousé (“accent grave over the
‘e,’” he keeps explaining so no one will call him “Souse,” as in “drunkard”),
who spends his days working crossword puzzles, entering contests and sneaking
cigarettes and alcohol in his room when he’s not hanging out at the Black Pussy
Cat Café in town, run by Joe Guelpe (Shemp Howard, who would later replace his
brother Curly in the Three Stooges but was a first-rate comic actor on his own,
frequently appearing with Abbott and Costello). The name of that establishment
represents Production Code enforcement at its absolute dippiest: Fields
originally wanted to call it the “Black Pussy Café” after a real bar his friend, British comedian Leon Errol, owned
in Los Angeles. But the Production Code Administration vetoed “Black Pussy
Café” as the name of a movie bar. Fields wrote a series of increasingly surreal
letters saying basically that if the California Alcoholic Beverage Control
Board didn’t mind there being an actual bar named “Black Pussy Café,” the Code people shouldn’t object to a
fictional one. In the end the signs on the bar set had to proclaim its identity
as the “Black Pussy Cat Café,”
but both Fields and another actor say just “Black Pussy Café” in the dialogue.
For The Bank Dick Fields got to
write not only the original story but the complete script as well — he’d been
upset at the changes Universal’s screenwriters had made to You Can’t
Cheat an Honest Man, especially that they’d
eliminated almost all the sympathetic aspects of his character and turned him
into a lout — a credit he took under the name “Mahatma Kane Jeeves.” One
imdb.com “Trivia” contributor said he got that from the call in plays of the
period, “My hat, my cane, Jeeves!,” but when he was interviewed in the 1970’s
by Richard Schickel for his series The Men Who Made the Movies, Orson Welles claimed Fields had come up with the
name as a tribute to him. Welles had performed amateur magic shows under the
name “The Great Mahatma,” “Kane” came from Citizen Kane (which was shooting at the same time as The
Bank Dick but wasn’t released until a year
later) and “Jeeves” from the butler character in P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie
Wooster novels, which both Fields and Welles admired.
Indeed, not only Fields’
character and his screenwriting
credit have typically Fieldsian names, but so do virtually all the dramatis personae in the film; his hellish family consists of his wife
Agatha Brunch Sousé (Cora Witherspoon), his mother-in law Hermisillo Brunch
(Jessie Ralph) — who runs the house with all the compassion and love of a commandant in a German concentration camp — and his daughters
Myrtle Sousé (Una Merkel, surprisingly good as an ingénue even though she was
old enough to have played Ann Rutledge in D. W. Griffith’s Abraham
Lincoln a decade earlier, and her portrayal
of Fields’ daughter is considerably edgier and less sympathetic than Mary
Brian’s in The Man on the Flying Trapeze and Rochelle Hudson’s in Poppy) and Elsie Mae Adele Brunch Sousé (child actress Evelyn Del Rio), a
mouthful of a name whose attempts of the other players to pronounce it in full
are themselves funny. Myrtle has a boyfriend, Og (short for “Oglethorpe”)
Oggilby (Grady Sutton, a frequent actor in Fields movies who lasted long enough
in the business to play the head of the school board in the Ramones’ vehicle Rock
’n’ Roll High School), who’s a teller at
the Skinner National Bank in Lompoc, the small town where all this takes place.
(When I saw this movie as a kid I assumed W. C. Fields had made up the name
“Lompoc” and the makers of the hilarious Roger Ramjet cartoons in the 1960’s had ripped it off from him,
so I was astonished to find there was a real California town named Lompoc; according to an
imdb.com “trivia” poster, the Lompocians pronounced the name “Lom-poke” instead
of the “Lom-pock” version heard in the movie, and it was also founded as a “dry”
town in which alcohol would not be available — and therefore they were not
happy that one of the most celebrated drunks in movies not only depicted their
city but put a bar in the middle of it.) What’s amazing about The
Bank Dick is that, even more than the
starring vehicles Fields had made before it, it and its successor, Never
Give a Sucker an Even Break (Fields’ last
film as star, though he made guest appearances in three more movies before his
death in 1946), is how totally it sits in the world of W. C. Fieldsiana: his
own script (not just the story but the actual screenplay), his favorite
director (ex-Keystone Kop Eddie Cline, whom he’d brought in to do his scenes in
You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man
after George Marshall, a first-rate comic director for Bob Hope, had proved
unable or unwilling to fit his work into the Fields ethos), and a land in which not only Fields’ own character
but virtually everyone in the
movie had an elaborate cognomen — Charles declared that “Fields was the best
nomenclator since Dickens,” and while he seemed more interested in getting a
rise out of me for using the word “nomenclator,” the comparison is apt since
Dickens was Fields’ favorite writer and Fields was superb as Mr. Micawber in
the 1935 MGM film of David Copperfield. (One of Fields’ great unrealized ambitions was to star in an
adaptation of The Pickwick Papers,
though to my mind the tragically
unmade Fields movie was one in which he would have played Shakespeare’s
Falstaff.)
The plot of The Bank Dick,
to the extent it has one, consists of Egbert Sousé’s more-or-less drunken
ramblings around Lompoc, during which he stumbles into Mackley Q. Greene
(future Captain America Dick Purcell), production manager for a movie company
shooting a one-reeler on location in Lompoc. When the official director, A.
Pismo Clam (played by fabled movie drunk Jack Norton), goes on a bender after
he gets a dear-John letter from his wife, Our Hero volunteers to take over and
boasts, “In the old Sennett days, I used to direct Fatty Arbuckle, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and the
rest of ‘em.” Eddie Cline had co-directed Keaton in several early films,
including Sherlock, Jr. (from
which he “borrowed” a great stunt gag in which a motorcycle cop drives through
a trench filled with diggers, upends them out of the trench and ends up
gripping the handlebars of his bike without the rest of it — this bit appears
in The Bank Dick as part of the
vertiginous final car-chase scene) and Fields himself had worked for Sennett,
but well past Sennett’s prime in a series of early-1930’s sound two-reelers (The
Dentist, The Pharmacist, The Barber Shop
and the awesome vest-pocket masterpiece The Fatal Glass of Beer). Sousé starts dictating a script which the studio
stenographers take down, though ultimately a clash with his family literally knocks him out of his director’s chair (for some
reason it’s on rockers) and Clam re-takes over the production. Then a couple of
bank robbers played by Al Hill and George Moran try to hold up the Skinner bank
— there’s some confusion as to their character names (the credits list Hill as
playing “Filthy McNasty” — a name Horace Silver later appropriated as the title
of one of his jazz originals — and Moran as “Cozy Cochran,” but in the actual
dialogue Hill is called “Repulsive Rogan” and Moran “Loudmouth McNasty” — and
Sousé sits down on a bus bench under which Moran’s character has just fallen
unconscious. Sousé is given credit for catching and incapacitating the man —
and naturally he exaggerates the life-threatening peril he was in, saying the
man held an “assegai” on him, a long knife which takes on broad-sword
dimensions and grows with each of his retellings — and he’s rewarded by bank
president Skinner (Pierre Watkin) with a job as the bank’s on-site security
person — “a bank dick,” Skinner
helpfully explains. Sousé tells his daughter’s boyfriend Og that he’ll come in
disguise and Og is supposed to wave to him if he recognizes him — Og
demonstrates the wave and it’s such a Gay hand gesture Sousé snarls, “Not so
obvious” (yet another one of those weirdly homoerotic gags Fields sometimes
threw into his movies — the most famous one is in International House, when Franklin Pangborn tells him “Wu-Hu” to inform
him where he is — Wu-Hu, China — and Fields looks down at the flower in his
lapel, throws it away and says, “Don’t let the posy fool ya’”) — though when Og
does give him the wave Sousé
can’t for the life of him remember why. On his first day as “bank dick” Sousé
collars an obnoxious kid with a toy pistol, and when the kid’s mom takes
umbrage Sousé asks, “Is his gun loaded?” “No,” mom replies, “but I think you are!”
Then an obvious con artist named J.
Frothingham Waterbury (Russell Hicks) comes into the bank looking for a buyer
for his 5,000 shares in beefsteak mines, and of course Sousé falls for it; he
recommends that Og buy the shares and “borrow” the $500 from his teller drawer
to pay for them. Both figure the money won’t be missed until the bank pays Og
his bonus four days later, but they don’t reckon with the sudden arrival of
bank examiner J. Pinkerton Snoopington (Franklin Pangborn, who instead of his
usual “pansy” cliché is a character of Javert-like singlemindedness and obsession;
it’s probably his best performance ever), who shows up with an imperious manner
and a determination to examine the bank books. Og expresses deathly fear in
that peculiarly baby-ish way Grady Sutton expresses such emotions, and Sousé
takes it upon himself to get Snoopington incapacitated (he takes him to the
Black Pussy [Cat] Café and asks Joe, “Has Michael Finn been in today?” “No, but
he will be,” Joe answers, signaling that he’s received the message that he’s
supposed to serve the bank examiner a drugged drink) and look after him in the
New Old Lompoc House hotel, but Snoopington has too much of a sense of duty to
be deterred. When he shows up at the bank with pince-nez to look at the books,
and he confesses that he’s blind without his glasses, Sousé manages to get him
to drop them to the floor, then crushes them under his foot. No matter, says
Snoopington; he opens his attaché case and he has at least four spare pair.
While all this is happening the local newspaper, the Lompoc
Picayune-Intelligencer (it looks like
Fields looked around for the two silliest names for real newspapers he could
find and jammed them together), reports that the beefsteak mines have proved a
bonanza for their lucky owners — a plot twist that in a modern story would be
called “magical realism — and con-man Waterbury tries to get Og to sell him
back the shares, only Sousé reads the newspaper story in time to stop him. Then
Repulsive Rogan returns for a second crack at robbing the bank and commandeers
Sousé’s car and Sousé himself as his getaway driver. The cops give chase and
the cars drive through dirt roads and farms until Sousé gets the bad guy stuck
on the edge of a cliff. He gets the reward for Repulsive Rogan’s capture as
well as a movie contract to buy the rights to the story he outlined earlier and
direct the film himself, and the final scene shows Sousé and his family in a
larger, better appointed house with decent wallpaper instead of the floral
horror they started out with, and with the trumpeter who announces their abode
with “Home, Sweet Home” at least playing it in tune (a clever touch). A butler
gives him a hat and a cane as he leaves for the final fade-out.
The
Bank Dick remains a comedy classic,
savagely funny mainly due to Fields’ relentlessness, his ability to create a
multi-faceted comic character from which he can spin off a wild set of gags and
plot circumstances to set them up. Though the film is disjointed (virtually all
Fields’ films are) and some of the plot points are improbable, to say the least
(the bit about the beefsteak mines turning out to be a bonanza seems Fields’
own tongue-in-cheek satire on how normal moviemakers relied on nearly as
improbable gimmicks to make their leads successful and bring about a happy
ending), we don’t have the sensation, as we do in too many modern so-called
“comedies,” that the authors are willing to do anything to get a laugh, character consistency be damned. The
Bank Dick is 200-proof W. C. Fields, a
jaundiced view of the world, and his follow-up, Never Give a Sucker
an Even Break, is even wilder — in that one
Fields is a filmmaker and Franklin Pangborn is his producer, to whom he’s
outlining his new story and it’s deliberately kept unclear how much of what
we’re watching is “real” and how much is the plot of Fields’ proposed movie.
(W. C. Fields, ancestor of Fellini.) Though Fields was losing his ability
physically to sustain a leading role — comparing his swollen, bloated
appearance here to what he looked like in Cline’s Million Dollar Legs eight years earlier (in which Fields, though hefty
and with the famous bulbous nose, was fit enough he could play a super-athlete
and get away with it) is sad — his comic instincts were as sure as ever and he
created a rich, personal and very
funny comic masterpiece.
