William Claude Dukenfield

I took Lilly to see The Bank Dick (1940) this evening, if nothing else to let her know that new movies aren’t the only things you can see at a movie theater. Of course it wasn’t shown at a commercial theater. For some reason, maybe a Fields fan on the movie selection committee, the Prairie Center for the Performing Arts, a municipal operation here in Schaumburg, decided to screen it along with a Fields short, The Barber Shop, dating from 1933.

To judge from the audience – two dozen people or so, among whom I was one of the youngest -- Fields’ star must be fairly faded by now. Lilly was the only child. Then again, unlike the Three Stooges, Fields probably wasn’t ever considered for children, though Lilly found enough of his antics amusing to avoid being bored. Whatever people originally considered risqué in his patter is either pretty mild now, or incomprehensible to an eight-year-old.

I myself was amused by the movies, sometimes by good lines…

Og Oggilby: Oh, I knew this would happen! I was a perfect idiot to ever listen to you!
Egbert Sousé (Fields): You listen to me, Og! There's nothing in this world that is perfect.

…and sometimes by slapstick, but Fields isn’t ever going to be a favorite. Maybe that’s because most of my exposure to him has been through caricature, rather than anything he did. He didn’t appear often on TV when I was growing up, and the selection committee at Vanderbilt’s Sarratt Cinema didn’t seem to contain his fans either, or I just didn’t notice when his movies played. Maybe he wouldn’t have quite been to my taste anyway.

An oddity in The Bank Dick was Shemp Howard, a comic character actor before he became a movie Stooge, who played Fields’ bartender. It was a minor part with few lines and no jokes, unless you count the very end of the movie, when a newly wealthy and supposedly reformed Fields spies his old bartender and decides to follow him off screen, presumably to get a drink. Then again, I suppose there was room in the movie for only one comedian, and it wasn’t Shemp.

I’m not really fond of Roger Ebert’s criticism, except some of his reviews of movies he hates, but I did find something apt about W.C. Fields in his review of The Bank Dick: “All of [Field’s] scenes depend, in one way or another, on sharing his private state: He is unloved, he detests life, he is hung over, he wants a drink, he is startled by sudden movements and loud noises, he has no patience for fools, everyone is a fool, and middle-class morality is a conspiracy against the man who wants to find surcease in alcoholic bliss. These are not the feelings of his characters; they are his own feelings.”