W.C. Fields, straight-up, would run roughshod over the hyperactive -- but warm and fuzzy inside -- louts who make up the Kevin Smith/Judd Apatow/Adam Sandler brands of contemporary comedy.

Through a series of nasty, ill-tempered comic turns for Paramount in the mid-'30s (particularly It's a Gift and The Man on the Flying Trapeze) Fields created a curdled comic mixture centered upon a rancid, cracked-mirror reflection of middle class life and small town morality. Fields' badgered and henpecked husband is forced to utter sarcastic retorts under his breath as he is slapped into submission by a nightmarish collection of harridan wives, prune-faced in-laws, and thoroughly despicable children and even animals. For Fields, the American Dream consisted of making it through another day of indignities and humiliations so that one can take solace in his own personal bottle of rotgut.

By the time Fields arrived at Universal, blustery windbag braggadocio had subsumed his tortured, small-town man with his singular brand of pungent sarcasm. The Bank Dick is the film that combined the two strains of Fields into the towering character of Egbert Souse (accent over the "e"), a beleaguered husband who could care less about his family of female torturers. He merely puts up with their insults until he can sneak out to the Black Pussy Cat Cafe and belt down another boilermaker.

Since the screenwriter (Fields, under one of his greatest pseudonyms, Mahatma Kane Jeeves) is not as interested in striking back at the family unit here, the film plays out as a strain of loose slapstick anarchy. (This self-referential carelessness would come to full flower in Fields' next and final film, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.)

Fields is at his peak, commanding the screen like John Barrymore -- another famed Hollywood alcoholic who was also at the end of his rope by 1940. Surrounded by thick-headed comic foils such as Grady Sutton and Franklin Pangborn, Fields is free to provoke the comic mayhem at will. It says a lot about the comic whirlwind engendered by the film that the most subdued presence in The Bank Dick is Shemp Howard.

Besides, in no other film has the distinctive brand of self-serving Hollywood pomposity been captured so succinctly and truthfully. At the Black Pussy Cat, Fields regales a movie producer about his filmmaking experience by bragging, "In the old Sennett days, I used to direct Fatty Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton. Even the rest of 'em. I can't get the celluloid out of my blood. At nights I used to tend bar."



These kids today, with the hair and the clothes.