Happy to say I found this film a lot more amusing than "It's A Gift", reputed to be W.C. Fields' funniest. Made six years later than the earlier film, it's as if Fields realized that the repetitive nature of the bits in 'Gift' tended to wear the viewer out, whereas he presented each of his humorous situations here just once and moved the viewer on to the next. Yet at the same time he recycled some of the ideas from the 1934 flick, like the pronunciation of his last name (accent grave over the e, Souse/Bissonette),the irritable wife and a willingness to beat his kid to prove how much he loved him or her. I don't know if these themes were staples of his pictures because I haven't seen enough of them, so I guess I'll find out in due course.

If you stay attentive to the opening credits you'll see one for Screenplay by Mahatma Kane Jeeves. Watching this film on Turner Classics and hosted by moderator Ben Mankiewicz, the origin of the name was explained by Fields' granddaughter, Dr. Harriet Fields. It was derived from one of Fields' sayings when he was getting ready to perform. He would ask for 'My hat, my cane and my shoes'. So a clever play on words, and as a word-smith, Fields sprinkles his story liberally with uncommon words like moon calf and jabbernowl. But he really caught my attention with a line that Hitchcock wound up using in his 1945 picture "Spellbound" when Ingrid Bergman says to Gregory Peck - "Professor, you're suffering from mogo on the go-go". However the phrase used here was 'mogo on the ga-go-go'.

Anyway, I found the picture to be highly entertaining, and even a bit risqué at times, Fields' caricature of being a souse notwithstanding. Every time the Black Pussy Cat Café came into view I had to wonder what was on Fields' mind, other than ordering up a depth bomb to wet his whistle. Similarly I would never had considered his proboscis to be an 'adsatitious excrescious', and by that time I thought he might have been making it all up as he went.

Above all, make sure you stick around for the well choreographed car chase near the end of the film. It reminded me a lot of the painstaking choreography Chaplin put into some of his pictures. The ditch diggers in particular stayed right on cue for their bit, and the near misses with the dueling road cars was epic timing at it's best. Something you take for granted today but back in the Forties I imagine it was quite the feat. With all that, one's best take away from the picture might well be the advice Egbert Souse offered his soon to be son-in-law on preparing for the future, even if it was offered in convoluted Fieldsian double talk - 'Don't wait too long in life'.

Even though Fields would go on to only do 2 more films, in many ways this film is his most satisfying effort of them all. He ghost wrote the script at Mahatma Kane Jeeves & the script is excellent. The sequences are all a perfect length & funny. The humor is Fields subtle quality & funny.

Fields often imagined himself as an accidental hero. In this film, his character Egbert Souse is exactly that. He plays the harried middle aged parent who battles his kids & his battle axed wife. He dreams of get rich quick schemes. One day on a park bench he is reading his paper when he accidentally foils a bank robbery.

From there, the comic possibilities multiply. His reward for foiling the robbery is a job as a bank guard. There he works with his future son-in-law. He gets his son-in-law into an unknowing stock scheme in Beef Stake mines using the banks money illegally.

Then when the bank examiner shows up, he connives with The Black Pussy Cafe owner (ably played by Shemp Howard) to delay the examiner. The stocks turns out to be a gold mine & the con man wants to buy it back. The future son-in-law is about to dump the stock back to the con man who sold it to him for little money because he needs to head off the bank examiner.

Fields finds out about the gold mine & stops him just in time. Then Fields gets involved with yet another bank robbery & him, the robber, the cash & the stock go on a wild car chase with the police. Fields actually borrowed parts of the chase from Harold Lloyds "Girl Shy" but then improved upon it.

After the chase, Fields daughter marries the now son-in-law from the bank & they move into a huge mansion on the Beef Stake mine money. Fields does a classic comic blackout to end the film.

The casting for this film all works very well & Fields material & comic timing are great. Even his advanced age stunts are well done. A fine film which still stands the test of time & made a lot of money for Universal when it was in theaters.

As I understand it, W.C. Fields spent at least most of his career playing henpecked drunks. Believe it or not, "The Bank Dick" is the first of his movies that I've ever seen; and I really liked it. Fields plays Egbert Souse - with an acute accent on the E - a bored family man never too aware of his surroundings. One day, he accidentally stops a bank robber but is only too happy to take credit for it. So they make him a security guard.

Throughout parts of the movie, I wasn't sure whether it was going to be as funny as I usually like (and there was a scene portraying a black man in a manner that wouldn't be allowed nowadays),but it was quite entertaining overall and the whole chase was certainly beyond a hoot. I suspect that they had a lot of fun filming it. Moreover, one might interpret Fields's as a look at America's aspirations of getting out of the Depression (that's pure conjecture, so don't quote me).

So, having seen this movie, I understand what W.C. Fields's brand of humor constituted. One can see why Warner Bros. animation department liked to caricature him as a manipulative pig in some cartoons. Worth seeing.