MAGNET contributing writer Jud Cost is sharing some of the wealth of classic films he’s been lucky enough to see over the past 40 years. Trolling the backwaters of cinema, he has worked up a list of more than 500 titles—from the silent era through the ’90s—that you may have missed. A new selection, all currently available on DVD, appears every week.
The Bank Dick (1940, 72 minutes)
A pair of socially prominent ladies of Lompoc, Calif., have come upon a curbside mail box with a most peculiar name. “Egbert Souse? Why, isn’t that an odd name?” clucks one. “It isn’t pronounced ‘Souse,'” answers the other politely. “It’s Egbert ‘Sou-zay,’ accent grave over the ‘e.'” “Oh, I see,” answers the first lady with a satisfied purr.
At the breakfast table of the family in question, a pair of loud thumps—as though a bowling ball is being dribbled upstairs—shocks the grandmother of the clan into gagging on her porridge. “What’s he up to now?!” spouts the elderly lady (Jessie Ralph). “Your guess is as good as mine, Ma. I never know what to expect next,” says the lady of the house (Cora Witherspoon), shoveling in fried potatoes with her fingers as if it were her last meal on earth. “Well, I’ll bet you anything he’s been smoking up in his room again! Now, this time, Agatha, you’ve just got to tell him to stop!” pronounces grandma, glowering at the staircase. “It’s his smoking that gave me asthma. If he don’t stop, I’m going on the county.”
“Imagine a man trying to take care of his family by going to theater bank nights, working puzzle contests and suggesting slogans! It’s just a lingering death!” moans the old lady, as the family’s 20-something daughter enters the dining room in tears. “What’s eatin’ you?” inquires her mother with little interest. “My Sunday school teacher told me he saw my father coming out of a saloon and that dad was smoking a pipe,” wails Myrtle (Una Merkel). “Oh, I’ll kill myself! I’ll starve myself to death!”
“Smoking and drinking and reading those infernal detective stories!” intones grandma, pronouncing sentence. Souse overhears the last line as he’s walking down the staircase and, with the tip of his tongue, grasps a smoldering cigarette stub from his lips and brings it inside his mouth to conceal the evidence. “The house just smells of liquor and smoke,” rails the old lady. “And there he goes again, down to the saloon to read that silly magazine.”
Souse (W.C. Fields) rips his copy of Detective from the hands of his pre-teen daughter (Evelyn Del Rio) who promptly kicks him in the shin, expelling the cigarette butt from his mouth like a champagne cork. In return, he knocks the child on the top of the head, making the sound of a monkey with a rock hammering a coconut. Before he can don his straw hat, the girl picks up a ketchup bottle and beans her old man. To get the last word, Souse hoists a potted plant from the front porch, but is interrupted by Myrtle introducing her beau. “Og Oggleby,” Souse repeats the young man’s name. “Sounds like bubbles in a bathtub,” and hands him the plant.
