140. The Bank Dick (1940)

Directed By Edward F. Cline

Synopsis

Drunken Fields helps capture a bank robber by accident. Gets made into a Bank Dick (detective, not Richard or male genitalia), hilarity ensues... in the end he captures another robber, gets 5,000 bucks and plus some money from a script he had written for the cinema and plus half the proceeds of this big mine. Happily ever after and shit.

Review

There are films that grow greatly in popularity in certain countries due to a particular emotional attachment. Many of these films are sub-par because let's be frank when we are kids we have really crap taste. This happens particularly with comedies, have you even honestly laughed at a joke that a 5 or 6 year old tells you? You might laugh at the ineptness with which it is told or how cute the child is but I can tell you that 99.9% of the times you will never repeat that joke to another adult as a funny joke unless you suffer from some sort of mental impairment.

It is only natural that the films that we loved as children, and particularly what we thought to be funny will stay in our hearts for a long time and even when we are old we are blind to their inherent shitiness. Then those children grow up to be cinema critics and suddenly some comedies that really don't deserve it enter the canon and are recognised as culturally significant by the Library of Congress. I figure that it is only when some one sees these films for the first time as an adult that an honest qualification can be made.

This in no way means that the 30's and 40's were a bad age for comedy, in fact some of my favourite comedies are from this age. But then you get stuff that, maybe because I am not American and I haven't grown up with them, leave me cold. One is the Marx brothers, which are too obvious and lacking in any subtlety whatsoever, and are only worth it for the surreal moments, and W.C. Fields, particularly The Bank Dick. This also happens with non-comedies like The Wizard Of Oz, but with comedies it is easier to gauge, because you are supposed to have a physical reaction of laughter or at least smile to them. In this film I got a bit of that in the first 5 minutes.

The part when Fields is leaving his house at the beginning works, and the car chase at the end also works, the first is funny the second is technically quite impressive. the other hour of the film is sadly quite dull. While the other Fields film on the list It's A Gift was actually quite novel and funny this one lags behind, not only by its own merits but because comedy has evolved so much since It's A Gift, it's a throwback and a not very good one. Fields is his usual bumbling old man, which is amusing but most of the secondary actors are pretty terrible and the direction doesn't get in the way of the film but doesn't help anything. So get it if you must at Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

5/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The film was written by Fields, using the alias Mahatma Kane Jeeves ("My hat, my cane, Jeeves!"), and directed by Edward F. Cline. Shemp Howard, one of the Three Stooges, plays a bartender.

The beginning of the film, and the only actually fun bit: