The Bank Dick (1940)
Dick was my first WC Fields, and I didn't get it. At this point, it is still recommended as a maiden voyage into one of the greatest, funniest, most unique comic personalities, one of the most unlikely successes, because Dick has nearly every gadget in the Fields profile, where the rest of his lamentably small, modest output, high in its Killer ratio, are even more esoteric, and this esoterica is arguably the core of Fields, read: not entry level.
[When I first saw The Bank Dick, almost none of his other pictures were available.]
Once that's through though, it's all here to revisit, each mumbling, scheming bit of it, becoming more massive like a magnum opus, not in the least where Fields is all the cruelties (often reflected back) of the character, as was supposedly the persona's signatures, are rewarded in the end. Although this feels like his biggest movie, to understand Fields is not in one particular thing but an entire firmament of material, material he notoriously fought to protect throughout his life, even the things like It's The Old Army Game and Million Dollar Legs. The other movies themselves are sometimes uneven due to their freewheeling, often disjointed narratives and surreal gags, but Fields is static (a variable exception to this is The Man on the Flying Trapeze), he's always the honest to himself scoundrel, prone to walk off the set in the middle of a scene because he's suddenly bored of it. In all of his films, especially The Fatal Glass of Beer, Fields in his heart often seems motivated in entertaining only himself.
Though Fields started in the movies with silents, where he's an accomplished pantomime, juggler, and slapstick artist who loves losing his hat, his rightful place was in talking pictures. It's hard to imagine Fields without his glottal stammers and humming drawls commenting on something mid-scene, sometimes seemingly unrelated, all like he's releasing aimless pigeons. His deliveries and jokes are consistently off-key, where they never quite end where they "should" and instead become extended notation until they run out of gas, hitting that last diesel backfire. He screams at slight movements, and he will unpredictably begin an oratory using a mash of flowery vocabulary with a songy cadence, openly inspired by his great love of Dickens. In The Golf Specialist, after a long vibration between silence and groaning, Fields turns on a dime, spouting for the people in the back: "Don't stand there! Don't you know I'll smite you in the sconce with this truncheon?"
One of the things about Fields too is that it's miraculous we even had him in the first place. He is basically unpleasant, but it's somehow irresistible, existing somewhere in the balance, no doubt owing to the mischievous goblin qualities of his alkie profile; a schnozzed, heavyset man who only wants to retreat from all the morons into his private world with his bottle. And his bottle he loves so much he's willing to jump out of a blimp for.
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