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Down on the movie set, he's confronted by a dreadful script and a pair of rather mismatched stars. With daring improvisation, Egbert tears up the screenplay and dictates some of his own fanciful ideas, confusing the crew and cast. However, who should show up but the family! Elsie Mae Adele Brunch Souse (Evelyn Del Rio) wants to be in the movie; if Egbert's wife Agatha (Cora Witherspoon) and her mother Mrs. Hermisillo Brunch (Jessie Ralph) have anything to do with it, she'll get her wish. It's all too much for poor Egbert, the recipient of unprovoked physical abuse by his annoying daughter Elsie, so he walks. A man who doesn't particularly care whether or not he has a job, leaving this one is no tragedy. Anyhow, it gives Egbert time to think about his older daughter Myrtle (Una Merkel) and her ardent suitor Og Oggilby (Grady Sutton). Og is a clerk at the town bank and this is where Egbert heads, just in time to meet some nice fellows by the name of Loudmouth McNasty (George Moran) and Repulsive Rogan (Al Hill).
The set-up of The Bank Dick is pure Fields, from the wild and bizarre names to the borderline anarchic antics that he finds himself mixed up in. The script (written under another of his pseudonyms) veers from subtle word-play to slap-stick and a chaotic car chase. What glues it all together is the great man himself, playing upon his public image as an outsider. A bad influence on the young and a perpetual target for the temperance league, at the time Fields was a slap in the face for the puritanical American heartland; nowadays he'd fit in on a public-access network. Despite this loss of context, however, the endless stream of double-takes, one-liners and dead-pan remarks remains awfully funny. Maybe it's the fact that The Bank Dick is somehow more restrained than the desperate to please, in-your-face comedies that spill out of Hollywood today.
Fields seems to take an almost perverse joy in his litany of throwaway gags; you have to stay alert as he casually tosses them into the background. It's a refreshing change. If there's a problem with The Bank Dick it's in the wasting of so many potentially amusing characters to no purpose. Egbert's family barely get a look in, with just a few standard scenes to their name. Even people such as J. Pinkerton Snoopington (Franklin Pangborn) are left to react to Fields rather than do anything independently. In the event this lack doesn't have too much effect because everything rushes by too fast, although it does leave the film feeling a bit spare.
Fields is excellent as usual, clever and cunning even through the veil of a whisky bottle. A comedy natural, with his sweep of mannerism and drawling voice (an accent that speaks of decades of hard living), it's difficult to separate the reality from the fiction. Perhaps Fields really did down his whisky straight, using the water merely to rinse his fingers, and ordered the ever present bottle to "take its hat off in the presence of a gentleman." Whatever the truth behind Fields, the result here is uniquely entertaining and well worth a sip (or two).
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