Homer Simpson, it can be argued, plays the role in our contemporary watching habits that the equally rolly-polly William Claude Dunkenfield - alias Otis Cribblecoblis, Mahatma Kane Jeeves or the more recognizable W.C. Fields - once played.
High Strung Family Man
Perhaps that means that every generation since the advent of talking images has needed one: the high-strung family man prone to periodically puncturing the pretense in which he is forced to live, desperate to kick, strangle or otherwise impulsively abuse a morally superior wife, a misbehaving child, or an officious boss - in short, to incarnate the "quiet desperation" of the average working male with the broadest, meanest postures possible.
The Legacy
From Fields, the original, we move on Jackie Gleason with his threats to send poor Audrey Meadows to the moon, to Britain's Basil Fawlty with his long-limbed nervosa, and finally, to Homer.
Naturally, their mutually shared shtick would repulse us entirely if each didn't manage to make themselves as lovable as they are loathsome - a quality each comic craftily cultivates.
The Bank Dick
With Fields, particularly in films like 1941's The Bank Dick, it's achieved no more complicatedly than by the world he builds around himself. The typical Fieldsian universe is an absurdist California suburbia, populated by high-toned shrews, overstuffed officials, and small town rubes; in short, a world that makes him look good, flaws and all, by comparison.
In The Bank Dick, Fields is Eggbert Souse (pronounced, the character insists, "Soo-zay",) a pitiful paterfamilias falsely attributed with foiling a bank robbery. The result? He is made bank detective, of course - a position that entitles him to privileged information, like a hot tip on a "beef steak mine," which he passes on to his prospective son-in-law. The stock turns out to be a dud, natch, but in the end, after elaborately distracting the too-prim bank examiner from discovering money that has been inappropriately appropriated to support this venture, all's well that ends well.
It's a typically Fieldsian plot: thin, episodic - hardly enough to fill the film's mere 72 minutes. And yet it does - for The Bank Dick is Fields' most focused work, a long vaudeville sketch in which just the right amount of comic business - from old vaudeville tricks to quotable witticisms -is applied in just the right spots. Most appreciated of all is Field's deft touch with expository dialogue; not a passage slows the pace, as sight gags, mugs, and low-mutter asides find their way amongst the crucial bits of information like flying cigar boxes in one of Fields' old juggling routines.
The direction, by longtime Fields lensman Eddie Cline, is nothing to speak of, but that's the norm when it comes to the greats - even for Chaplin, who directed himself. For stage-trained comics such as Fields, the Marxes and others of the era, the camera was but a proscenium arch by which their antics were framed. Had any of them ever been given a camera as busy as themselves, as was sometimes the fate of later comics from a theatrical tradition (example: Zero Mostel,) who knows what percentage of their personas would have gone undiscovered?
Raise A Glass
Raise a glass, then, to W.C. Fields, and to those since his death, from Jack Albertson in TV's Chico and the Man to the big screen's Grumpy Old Men, who have been carved in his corpulent, curmudgeonly image.
Better yet, locate The Bank Dick - it's available on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection - and vicariously unleash the lovable misanthrope that lurks inside you.
