A Film Canon

To an even greater extent than It's A Gift, The Bank Dick confronts W.C. Fields with a world crying out to be vaselined, torturing him with its angles at every turn, but now inducing him to exhibit a capacity for catastrophic action that makes for a delightful incongruity with his muddled persona. When this action is intentional, it clarifies him as a giant child, and his comic universe as the adult world filtered through the eyes of a child, explaining its profusion of ridiculous roles, categories, restrictions and words, as well as its reduction of every human impediment to a nagging parent. However, for the most part Fields' catastrophism is unintentional, or, at the very least, leaves him oblivious to its true magnitude. Hence the extended gag in which he transforms a bank inspector into a version of himself, 'poisoning' his alcohol and then agonising him with promises of rich meals, without ever fully registering his apparent proximity to death. As this might suggest, the common denominator between Fields' mildness and violence is inebriation, which, like his trademark mumbling, represents a strategy for cocooning himself from the world, as if his ultimate ambition were to converse with alcohol, or even inhabit it, as evinced in his vision of a pastoral landscape watered by beer - a pithy subversion of the supposed pleasures of small-town family life. As with It's A Gift, this silent paradise is conflated with Fields' mythical heyday, here explicated in his claim to have directed Chaplin, Keaton and Arbuckle under Mack Sennett, paving the way for his parodic tribute to the Keystone Kops.