The Unsung Joe

Gerta Rozan

If an actress found that the big studios would give her work only as an extra, she could try the smaller independent studios, who might throw her a line or two. If she wanted something more -- a role that would showcase whatever talents she believed herself to have -- she could head for Poverty Row, where, if she was lucky, a studio like Monogram or Republic might be persuaded to let her play a character with a second name once in a while.

Gerta Rozan did all of that. As far as 20th Century Fox and RKO were concerned, she was strictly an extra; at the independent studios, she got a few small roles with a couple of lines; and only PRC, one of the most minor of all the Poverty Row studios, was prepared to give her a proper role, which it did when it cast her as an exotic opera singer whose murder in the second reel provides the mystery to be solved in the modest little B-picture, The Panther’s Claw (1942). It was the biggest role she was ever to have, and it gave her a brief chance to demonstrate her ability to project happiness, uncertainty, desperation, confusion and a range of other dramatic emotions, all in one short scene. Sadly, she is upstaged by the simple, old-fashioned ham-acting of the suspected villain, played by a character actor called Thornton Edwards, whose ludicrous performance rather dominates the scene:

The film doesn’t really give her a second chance to make a better impression. In her next scene, she’s a corpse:

Gerta (whose real name was Gertrude Rosen) was born in 1912 in Vienna. As a child, she was determined to be an actress and, at the age of 14, she ran away from home to join a theatre company. When her parents sent the police to bring her home, she threatened to commit suicide unless they were called off. Her parents relented, and Gerta went on to play in stock companies in Germany and Austria, eventually appearing in small roles in a few early German musicals.⁽¹⁾

The vibrant Berlin of the 1920s must have seemed ideal to a young actress like Gerta, but the good times weren’t going to last. The Nazi party was expanding across the country, its membership was growing ever larger and Hitler was consolidating his position as the unofficial leader of the opposition. Not that that would have meant much to Gerta -- if a story that she’d tell in later years can be believed, she doesn’t seem to have been keeping up with politics at that point. Apparently, one day, in the dining room of a large Berlin hotel, Gerta noticed a little man who she assumed was a Chaplin imitator. Watching his nervous motions and the way he wiggled his tiny moustache, she started to giggle appreciatively. Hearing her, the man turned and glowered at her. Taking this to be another part of his comedy routine, she whooped with laughter, which -- rather oddly, she thought -- caused his glower to deepen. It was around then that a couple of men approached his table, saluted and said, “Heil Hitler”.

She shouldn't have felt too bad; that probably happened to him all the time.

She’d lost her youthful innocence by the time the Nazi party took power, and, later, she liked to tell the story of what happened when she defied the orders of a couple of storm troopers by going into a Jewish shop. By the time she came out, a large, silent crowd of brownshirts had gathered. Gerta told them they made her almost ashamed of being an Aryan, and an officer warned her that she’d be punished for such talk and would be exposed in newsreels as a betrayer of Nazi ideals. “That’s fine!” she snapped, “I’ve always wanted to be in pictures!”

She might have embellished the story a little, but there’s no reason to doubt its basic truth: she didn't like the Nazis. Her short career in German films stopped the year the man with the funny moustache took office and, not long after that, she left Europe and headed for the United States.

There’s no record of exactly what she did for the next few years, but she obviously made her way to Hollywood, where things can’t have gone as well as she might have hoped they would, because the next time she surfaces, she’s walking down Cahuenga Boulevard in her underwear:

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She was picketing the offices of the independent Loew-Lewin studio to protest what she claimed was its unfair treatment of her. To make her point more forcefully, she announced that she would be removing one item of clothing every day she stood outside. The first day, she took off her blouse. The second day, she lost her skirt:

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On the third day, she not only took off her chemise but, showing the full extent of her shameless desperation, she also removed her hat:

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Obviously, the gal meant business!

Standing in her black silk underwear, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers and journalists, she gave a press conference to denounce the studio and urge people not to see its new film, So Ends Our Night (1940), a wartime melodrama from which the one scene that she appeared in had been cut. "My scene was the sexiest in their motion picture. I was the girl who lived for love, and I proved it to Fredric March. I gave my everything to that picture, and they cut me out. It was the first big part I ever had in a picture -- and blooey. They didn't ruin me, they threw me away. That is no way to treat a girl."⁽⁵⁾

The crowd cheered, and the humiliated producers rushed out of the building, threw an overcoat over her shoulders and hustled her inside for negotiations.

It was bunk, of course, but most newspapers were happy to simply print the story and give So Ends Our Night priceless front-page publicity in return for a reasonable excuse to print pictures of a half-naked lady. A syndicated gossip columnist called Paul Harrison smelled a story, however, and followed Gerta and the producers inside, where he witnessed their negotiations. “They played it straight," he observed. "The actress said the role was important to her career, and that the executives had assured her the part had been admirably played. Mr Lewin said that was true, but they were going to have to chop out a lot because the film was about three hours long. She insisted. He hedged. She threatened to resume her picketing. And he capitulated."⁽⁶⁾

Gerta’s scene was reinstated (if it was ever really cut), and here she is, the girl who lived for love:

She sidles up to Fredric March suggestively. She knows she can have him -- she's obviously had him before -- but, tonight, he’s too busy dwelling on the awfulness of life to notice her, so she turns the light off and removes her sweater. March is appalled at her inappropriate behaviour – can’t she see he’s brooding?

He storms off into the night, ending a scene that, not to be unfair to Gerta, the audience could have lived without.

After witnessing Gerta's “negotiations” with the producers, Harrison hung around while she got dressed and then took her aside to interview her for his column. She told Harrison how she loved acting so much she’d run away from home. She told him how she’d laughed in Hitler’s face, how she’d mocked Nazi storm troopers and how, when she’d fled Germany, she’d been determined to make it to Hollywood because what she’d told those soldiers was true: she really had always wanted to be in pictures.

It was obvious that the striptease picket had been a set-up, but Harrison was rather taken with Gerta: "her eyes are large and blue ... her generous mouth is made for smiling [and] her face can mirror a lot of emotion." His overall impression? "Miss Rozan has spunk," he wrote. "And a sense of humor. She also has what it takes to fill out a set of silk scanties". Physical attributes aside, he concluded: "I guess she's a pretty good actress."

Perhaps she was; we have no way of knowing. Not long after her appearance as a corpse in The Panther’s Claw, she quit Hollywood and headed for the east coast. Around the end of the 1940s, she appeared in a supporting role in a Broadway play that closed in under a week, and that’s the last trace of her before she dropped out of sight altogether.

Sources -- (1)All early biographical information from Paul Harrison's column in Hope Star, AS, Dec 4, 1940; (2) and (3)Winnipeg Free Press, Nov 28 1940; (4)Las Cruces Sun-News, Dec 2, 1940; (5)Zanesville Signal, Nov 28, 1940; (6)Hope Star, AS, Dec 4, 1940. 

Sally Yarnell

There are all kinds of reasons why ending up as an extra isn't the worst thing that can happen to an actor. For instance, in the space of a couple of minutes in His Kind of Woman (1951), a 35-year-old extra called Sally Yarnell gets to share the screen with two legends of American cinema. First, she plays piano while Jane Russell sings, and raises a glass to her at the end of the song:

And, in the next shot, she exits the scene, a blur of motion who merits a quick appreciative glance from a hound-dogging Robert Mitchum at the bar:

Of course, for an extra, the downside of getting to do a scene with massive stars like those two is that the audience is even less likely than usual to notice you at all. Especially if those stars have the advantage of actually facing the camera while all anyone can see of you is the back of your head.

It's not the kind of role that an actress can pretend might lead to bigger things, but, by this stage in her career, it must have been many years since Sally had given up hoping that that might happen. We're not usually happy with the idea of someone giving up their dream -- in the context of the movies, especially, it strikes us as terribly sad -- but, given what happened to Sally before the end of the '50s, it was probably just as well that she did. In fact, it might have saved her life, or, at least, made sure that her life was worth living.

Sally had come comparatively late to the movies, starting off as a dancer extra in her late 20s. By the time she made His Kind of Woman, she'd been working for almost 10 years, getting nothing but bit parts.

If she hadn't broken through, it wasn't for lack of trying. She'd spent the war years doing exactly what an aspiring starlet was supposed to do: getting ink by any means necessary. She'd done plenty of modelling work for the war effort -- patriotically removing her stockings to encourage women to donate theirs to be made into parachutes for the air force⁽¹⁾, or donning revealing red-white-and-blue swimwear to convince women that they needn't selfishly squander precious material on full-torso bathing suits:

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She also made sure that gossip columnists were able to print regular snippets about her being seen with eligible movie talent. Mostly, her name would be linked to minor celebrities like John Howard or Peverell Marley (people who would benefit from being seen with a beautiful companion almost as much as Sally would benefit from being seen with them), but one clipping shows that she was smart enough to once get herself spotted helping Mickey Rooney get over his divorce from Ava Gardner by spending time with him in a secluded spot, where they were seen "sighing into each other's eyes."⁽³⁾ It's impossible to tell how many of those romantic rendezvous actually took place, of course, but each mention signifies an attempt by Sally to keep her name in the papers, to construct a profile as an actress who shouldn't look out of place in that sort of company

However, in 1945, the gossip-column coverage suddenly came to an end. It's unlikely to be a coincidence that Sally turned 30 that year. The question is, did the papers drop Sally (possibly because they felt, perhaps uncharitably, that behaviour that is charming in a young ingenue is hard to pass off as anything but vulgar in someone a little older) or did Sally simply stop making the effort to get publicity? Might it be that she had given herself until she was 30 to try to become a proper actress, and that once it was clear that that was never going to happen, she quit wasting money on whoever she was paying to plant stories in the press? The idea has a certain appeal, if only because it at least makes her out to be less of a victim.

Whatever the case, the fact that she was out of the papers didn't mean that she was out of work. Right after His Kind of Woman, she got a job in another Robert Mitchum picture, The Racket (1951). This time, though, her part was even smaller (although she was in the foreground of the shot, it lasted only a few seconds), and she didn't even get to share a set with any stars:

 

It's hard to think of a role that would have been further removed from the glamour of Hollywood than playing one of a roomful of police dispatchers. Could there have been more dispiriting work for an extra? Not only would there have been no famous actors around, but the chances are that you wouldn't even have caught a glimpse of the director, as this kind of scene would have been palmed off on some assistant or other. An extra playing a police dispatcher could justifiably reflect on the bleak possibility that they only got the work that day because the crew couldn't be bothered to find a decent bit of stock footage.

Still, these were Sally's roles: party guests, people in the street and -- increasingly -- secretaries. Her 40th birthday came and went, and the bit parts kept coming.

In 1956, however, she somehow managed to snag a featured role in a low-budget shocker called The Black Sleep. Sadly, the film is absolutely terrible (not that its producers intended it to be anything but). One of the few contemporary reviews noted that "little imagination was used on the script", which "uses the oldest plot ever employed for such pictures: a mad doctor experiments on human beings, turns them into monsters and then watches them run wild."⁽⁴⁾ The lead monster was played by the king of B-movie monster men, Tor Johnson, and Sally got to play one of the supporting monsters. She has no lines, but her part is memorable, at least:

Evidently, whatever bizarre experiment was performed on her character by the evil surgeon, it left her with little in the way of visible damage other than a touch of baldness and a couple of odd tufts of hair here and there on her body, but that seems to have been enough to meet the film's low threshold for monstrosity.

The still shows her just after the monsters have escaped from their dungeon prison and are rampaging through the house. They're supposed to be enraged and terrifying, but Sally just looks like she's having an enormous amount of fun, which I'm sure she was; after more than a decade of dutifully taking the most mundane roles in Hollywood, she seems to have decided that she may as well make the most of the opportunity to run around in her underclothes wearing a peculiarly shaved wig, shrieking and snarling like a wild little girl.

The role even brought her to the attention of the newspapers again, with the syndicated columnist Jimmie Fiddler writing a decent-sized paragraph about her (although he got the name of the film wrong):

"Sally Yarnell, featured as a lady monster in 'The Black Sheep,' spends three hours in the makeup department before reporting to the set. She has to have tufts of hair glued to her arms and chest, one hair at a time. Then she spends three more hours having it removed before she goes home at night. The actress, who is a pretty girl under the makeup, tells me she's enjoying the change of pace from goody-goody roles."⁽⁵⁾

When she was in her 20s, she used to get in the papers for more glamorous reasons, but this must have been better than no coverage at all.

However, if 1956 was the high point of her career, the next year was the low point of her life. She made the papers again, but not in a good way:

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Sally had been a passenger in a car that slammed into the back of a street-sweeping truck one night in February, 1957. The people she was with -- a couple in the front seat (the husband was driving) and another man, presumably Sally's date -- were hurt badly, but Sally came off worst of all. The news story said she had "suffered critical scalp injuries". The skin had been torn right off her skull. She'd been almost totally scalped.

It's a small mercy that the reporter didn't happen to realise that the horribly injured woman missing most of her hair had appeared in a film the year before as a half-bald monster. It would have made for a juicy follow-up piece, but I imagine that Sally could have done without being reminded of the macabre irony. Things were surely awful enough without having her life turned into material for a strange-but-true filler item.

That wasn't the end of Sally, though. Unsurprisingly, her list of film credits thins out around this point but, in time, she went back to work and, in 1959, she celebrated an important milestone of sorts: "Nothing like making a career of one kind of role ... Sally Yarnell landed her 60th assignment as secretary for her featured appearance in Round the Flag ... This time, she is a WAC-secretary at the Pentagon in Washington."⁽⁷⁾

In the 1960s, Sally moved into television work, turning up in a small role as a passenger of a UFO in a Twilight Zone episode called "To Serve Man" (1962):

She looks good! Indeed, she looks so good that it's hard to believe that this woman queuing up excitedly to board an alien spaceship is the same woman who, only a few years before, had been scalped in a car wreck. But it is, and she was, as becomes clear when she raises her eyebrows in response to something the woman beside her says and a strange, unnatural crease wrinkles that flawless forehead, like a fold appearing in a sheet of thick rubber:

No one seeing her on television would notice it if they weren't looking for it, but anyone who met Sally in person would been well aware that something pretty bad must have happened to her. It's the kind of thing that you can't help but notice but, on reflection, think better of asking about.

It's also the kind of thing that can ruin someone's life, particularly in Hollywood. It would surely have ruined Sally's life if it had happened, say, 10 years earlier, when she had reason to hope that, if she kept being seen in the right places with the right people and managed to keep her name in the papers, she might yet become a movie star.

But it didn't ruin her life. She coped and perhaps even thrived after her accident. Maybe that's because, long before that night in 1957, she'd already given up on the hope that she might dazzle her way into a glamorous Hollywood life and had allowed herself to settle for a career in the shadows. Perhaps, as a steady, unambitious extra, she simply lost far less than she would have lost if she'd hit that truck before she'd given up on the idea of herself as a starlet on the cusp of stardom, and that's why it wasn't impossible for her to build it all up again and carry on living the life she had, even if it wasn't the life she might have wanted.

Sally retired in the mid-70s, when she was 60. She died in Denver, Colorado in 1995.

Sources: imdb.com; (1)Casa Grande Dispatch, June 29, 1944; (2)Edwardsville Intelligencer, July 14, 1943; (3)San Antonio Light, July 8, 1943; (4)Syracuse Herald-Journal, Sept 10, 1956; (5)Nevada State Journal, March 16, 1956; (6)Long Beach Press-Telegram, Feb 11, 1957; (7)Winnipeg Free Press, Jan 14, 1959.

Lee Tung Foo

Three great Oriental sleuths, far from their ancestral homelands, solved untold numbers of crimes in the 1930s. Who knows what America – or the world, indeed – would have done without the crime-fighting talents of these extraordinary men.

The most celebrated of the three was, of course, the Chinese American family man, Charlie Chan, who met any situation, no matter how deadly, with a little folksy wisdom that he would dispense via an appropriate Confucian aphorism. Second to Chan was the Japanese master of disguise, Mr Moto, an international detective who was partial to decidedly more violent methods of investigation than the avuncular Chan. The least renowned was Mr Wong, the soft-spoken San Franciscan private detective of refined tastes, who hid a razor-sharp intelligence behind a humble, self-effacing manner.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Chan, Moto and Wong, however, was that the actors who were most associated with the roles were, respectively, Warner Oland (Swedish), Peter Lorre (German-Hungarian) and Boris Karloff (English). But it doesn’t matter; you’d never guess they weren’t Asian:

Asians might not have been allowed to star in these pictures, but there were plenty of supporting roles available, like Mr Wong’s butler, although he wasn't given much to do beyond opening the occasional door. Here he is in Mr Wong, Detective (1938), opening the door to a chemical manufacturer who’s going to be murdered the next day:

 

In this still, from The Mystery of Mr Wong (1939), he’s opening the door to the secretary of a wealthy jewel collector who was murdered just the day before:

Here, in Mr Wong in Chinatown (1939), he opens the door to a Chinese princess, who’s going to be murdered in this very same scene:

And, in Phantom of Chinatown (1940), the final film in the Mr Wong series, he’s opening the door to Mr Wong himself. He might be surprised at how Asian his boss seems all of a sudden. That’s because Karloff had left the series and had been replaced by Keye Luke – the first Chinese person to play a Chinese detective in American cinema!

The man with the talent for opening doors is Lee Tung Foo, and these scenes are part of the low-key final phase of a career in show business that started in the early years of the 20th century. Here he is around 1910, when he was known as “the most remarkable China man in the United States”:⁽¹⁾ 

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The poster behind him proclaims him to be "a great novelty", and the one beside it supplies the reason for his novelty, which is that he's "the only Chinese vocal entertainer". The only one? Apparently so -- at least, the only one known to non-Chinese audiences.

In turn-of-the-century America, Tung Foo was considered to be something of a freak of nature, as he was "the first Chinaman with a singing voice".⁽³⁾ The woman who taught him to sing, Margaret Blake Alverson, viewed Tung Foo's ability to sing professionally as the greatest achievement of her teaching career, because "it is a known fact that the Japanese and Chinese are wholly unmusical." To begin with, however, she was reluctant to take on Tung Foo as a pupil, saying that she "was not particularly fond of the Chinese and never employed them in any way." Eventually, she relented, partly because she was told that Tung Foo was broken-hearted with disappointment, but mostly because she was attracted by the challenge of training a member of a race whose unsophisticated musical scale was composed of only "[f]ive discordant ... unmusical and untrue chords".⁽⁴⁾

Tung Foo was 22 when he started his lessons, which continued for the next eight years, during which time he supported himself by working as a household servant or railroad cook. The training was hard. Alverson initially judged him to have a "dull, unmelodious, unmusical voice", but she was impressed by his "indomitable will and determination to succeed", and, by 1904, decided that his voice had reached a satisfactory level (although it went without saying that he would never have "the clear, ringing tone that is in the gift of the white race") and that, with his repertoire of 75 songs in English, German and Latin, he was ready for the stage.

He was an immediate hit. The public were not only amazed that a member of a race that was undeniably genetically unsuited to the world of music could sing as well as any performer they'd seen, but were impressed that “he had a large English vocabulary and most of the ways of an American”, although that shouldn't have been too surprising, given that he'd been born in California.⁽⁵⁾ Obviously, there were lessons to be learned by his fellow Chinese: “Lee Tung Foo … is an example in progress to all his countrymen. Had his race possessed in common some of the assimilating qualities which he possesses in particular, the Chinese would never have dropped behind in the march of civilisation.”⁽⁶⁾

Clearly, one of the attractions of Tung Foo’s performance was its novelty aspect -- like a talking dog act -- but it also seems to have been an entertaining bit of vaudeville theatre involving a variety of well-performed songs, ethnic caricatures and comedy routines. His signature piece was his impersonation of a Harry Lauder-style Scotsman:

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“I don’t sing as well as Harry, but I can sing Louder”, he joked. He would also say that, although people might not believe it, there was some Scotch in him -- nearly half a pint.⁽⁸⁾

Tung Foo toured all the vaudeville circuits, playing to thousands-strong audiences in all the major cities in the USA and Canada, and even travelled to Europe (although Scotland seems to have been denied a glimpse of him in a kilt, which is a pity).

His schedule kept him away from California for years at a time, but he kept in touch with Alverson, who appears to have grown genuinely fond of her pupil in spite of his unfortunate ethnic handicap. On one occasion, she marked his return to California after a year's absence by performing a song that she'd written for the occasion. She obviously meant well, but the lyrics show that she still struggled somewhat to strike quite the right tone on matters of race:

"He can sing you any song, the old and the new,
And while he is a chink, he doesn't wear his queue,
And the state of California, he claims as well as you,
This well known Chinese singer,
Just Lee Tung Foo."⁽⁹⁾

I'm sure he appreciated the effort.

Tung Foo started to withdraw from vaudeville by the mid-1910s, and stopped performing entirely in 1919, at the age of 45. “I quit vaudeville before it died,” he told a journalist, decades later, adding, “I was tired of hearing my voice alla time.”⁽¹⁰⁾ There was more to it than that, though. He'd always had an idea that he might have the chance to play serious dramatic roles in the theatre, rather than just sing songs and perform skits in vaudeville, but that seemed as distant a possibility after his success as it had before. There simply weren't the roles.

So he did what thousands of Chinese Americans, rich and poor, had done before him, and opened a Chinese restaurant. He called his Jung Sy, and declared it to be "the most select Chinese dining place in New York City"!

 

Soon after, it was doing so well that he opened another, the Imig Sy, and settled down in New York as a restaurateur. And so passed Tung Foo's 1920s.⁽¹⁰⁾

By the 1930s, however, he’d returned to the stage, appearing in minor roles in plays on Broadway (to which his restaurants were strategically close). In 1932, while on a trip to California, he appeared in a short film called The Skull Murder Mystery, but nothing seemed to come of that, and he returned to New York. Four years passed before Lew Milestone, who was casting supporting Chinese roles in a Gary Cooper film, The General Died at Dawn (1936), remembered seeing Tung Foo in a play called Roar, China and tracked him down and persuaded him to return to California.⁽¹²⁾ This time, Tung Foo decided to stay on in Hollywood, and immediately began to secure small roles, such as Mr Wong’s door-opening servant.

One of his first bit-parts was in Thank You, Mr Moto (1937). He obviously hadn’t been typecast yet, as, instead of a servant or other menial character, he got to play a Mongolian camel-trek guide who looks on in a detached sort of way as customs police arrest Mr Moto (Peter Lorre, of course, further confusing ethnic boundaries by playing not only a Japanese detective but one who is in disguise as a Mongolian merchant):

By the time Tung Foo appeared in Laura (1944), following the Mr Wong films, he was firmly established as a quiet, unobtrusive servant:

And in Calcutta (1947), he was busy opening doors again:

It’s not as if these jobs came easily, either. Even getting the tiny role of a cook in The Thing from Another World (1951) took a surprising amount of effort:

“When Producer Howard Hawks put out a call for a Chinese to play that part, sixteen applicants answered, either in person or through their agents. But Lee stood out from the throng like a lighthouse in a fog when he arrived at the studio, precisely at noon, and opened negotiations by placing on Hawks' desk a huge tray, loaded with a full-course Chinese dinner. Hawks ate enthusiastically, and having eaten, could scarcely do less than offer the man who had furnished his meal a test. Only after he’d landed the role did Lee Tung Foo confess that he’d bought the meal in a nearby restaurant.”⁽¹³⁾

His ingenuity wasn’t wasted, as he was rewarded with two whole words -- "Coffee, captain?" -- spoken as the hero walks out of the room:

At least the captain could open doors for himself.

Apart from that scene, Tung Foo appears only as a silent presence in the deep background, calmly regarding the excitable Caucasian crewmembers with his well-practised, wide-eyed, unemotional gaze:

It's difficult to say whether Tung Foo saw the movies as a pleasant way of passing his old age, or whether he turned up at each casting call in the hope that this role might be the one that would lead to the serious dramatic roles that he'd dreamed of as a young vaudeville star. I hope it was the former, because the latter never happened. He spent the rest of the 1950s playing cooks, waiters and servants -- more or less the same jobs he'd done to pay his way through his training with Margaret Blake Alverson.

It's interesting, then, that Tung Foo's last role should have been such a departure. It's still just a face-in-a-crowd role -- it only lasts a few seconds, and he doesn't do anything but sit there like a wax dummy -- but, at the age of 87, he appeared as one of the sinister Communist espionage chiefs who observe the brainwashing demonstration at the start of The Manchurian Candidate (1962):

 

That's him at the bottom right. Here’s a close-up:

 

At least he went out on something of a high.

I think it would be appropriate to close with a verse (happily, without ethnic slurs, this time) of the song that his old music teacher sang for him more than half a century earlier. It doesn't make too bad an epitaph.

"And now my dear young singer, I've sung my song to you,
I'm glad that you are with us, we greet you fond and true,
You have made your own successes, and battled bravely through,
And now your state may honor,
Just Lee Tung Foo."

Tung Foo died in 1966, at the age of 91.

Sources: (1),(3),(5)San Antonio Daily Express, Aug 9, 1908; (2), (7)California State Library; (4)Alverson, Margaret Blake, Sixty Years of California Song (San Francisco, Sunset Publishing House, 1913), chapter 19. All quotes directly attributed to Alverson are from this chapter of this book; (6)Janesville Daily Gazette, Sept 23, 1914; (8), (9), (11)Moon, Krystyn, "Lee Tung Foo and the Making of a Chinese American Vaudevillian, 1900s-1920s", JAAS Feb 2005; (10)Big Spring Herald, July 21, 1940; (12)Waterloo Daily Courier, May 3, 1936; (13) The Evening Standard, Uniontown PA, Nov 7, 1950;

Irving Cohen

Sitting in a Brooklyn jail cell, Abraham "Pretty" Levine, a low-level gangster on the fringes of the contract-killing syndicate that became known as Murder, Inc, maintained a loyal silence for most of March 1940. When he finally broke, as the cops had always known he would, he spilled everything he knew about the gang -- how it worked, who ran it and where the bodies were. Eventually, he became the leading witness for the prosecution in the trials that finished Murder, Inc and sent his former bosses to the chair, which is as good a reminder as any of the importance of bit-part players.

One of the stories Pretty told the District Attorney is of particular interest to us, because it starts with a trip to the cinema.

One night, just a few months before he was arrested, Pretty bought a ticket for Golden Boy (1939), a film about a prize fighter. Imagine his dismay when it turned out that, instead of tough boxers duking it out in the ring and triumphing against the odds, the movie was one of those sappy family melodramas full of yakking dames and weepy fathers and with hardly any boxing at all.

As the final reel approached, Pretty was so bored that even the long-overdue climactic boxing match in Madison Square Garden was unable to fully capture his attention, and he found himself noticing background details, like the interesting extras in the quick cutaway shots. There were well-dressed guys from Harlem; there were ex-pugs with squashed noses and cabbage ears; there were some millionaire types in evening dress. And then there was a three-second shot of a bunch of tense gamblers, all chewing gum nervously because they've bet big on the fight: 

    

This, Pretty told the DA, was amazing. He could hardly believe what he was looking at. Plastered right there in the very middle of the movie screen were the unmistakeable features of a guy called Big Gangy Cohen, who Pretty hadn't expected ever to see again. He hadn't seen him or heard anything about him since he'd vanished in the aftermath of a bloody murder one dark night in the Catskills, two years earlier.

At that time, Irving -- to give Big Gangy his real name, which we must, as contemporary sources don't seem to be able to agree on whether he spelled his name Gangy or Gangi -- was first lieutenant to a mobster called Walter Sage, who operated a slot machine racket in the Catskill resorts. The Murder, Inc bosses had given Sage the concession as a reward for years of steady service, including a number of contract killings.

Most of Murder, Inc's killers were small-time Jewish or Italian hoods from Brooklyn, like Sage or Pretty Levine. The gang -- which called itself the combination; "Murder, Incorporated" was a journalistic invention -- had invented an ingenious and lucrative scheme that enabled them to carry out murder contracts for mobs across America. The low-level gangsters who were given the contracts had no connection to the victim, and, often, didn't come from the same city, so the police had little hope of catching them. During the 1930s, Murder, Incorporated's hitmen killed hundreds of people throughout the country and were seldom caught.

Naturally, therefore, when the gang found out that Sage had been skimming the profits from the slots racket, they decided to have him killed as well. What did he expect they would do? They're Murder, Inc.

Pretty explained to the DA that Irving was nominated to be one of the killers as Sage was his best friend and wouldn't be suspicious when he suggested that they go for a late-night drive way up into the mountains with a man called Jack Drucker, another killer they knew. The hit was organised by one of the higher-up mobsters called Pittsburgh Phil, who tailed Irving, Sage and Drucker as they drove through the night. His car was driven by Pretty Levine.

At a lonely spot in the road, Pretty watched the tail lights ahead of him swerve suddenly back and forth. The car tipped into a ditch and, as Pretty and Pittsburgh Phil pulled up, the back doors opened. Out of one stepped Drucker, wiping blood from his icepick. Out of the other sprung Irving, "as if fired from a cannon". The others watched, stunned, as he charged into the woods, screaming incoherently. According to Pretty, they had no idea what had come over Irving and they didn't follow him to try to find out, as they had to get on with the urgent job of lashing a pinball machine to the corpse of Walter Sage and dumping it in a lake.

And that, Pretty Levine told the DA, was the last he'd seen of Irving until the stupid lug blew his own cover by showing up at the end of Golden Boy.⁽¹⁾

Was Irving supposed to have also been killed that night? Pretty didn't know. Neither did Irving, but he knew he shouldn't stick around to find out. He fled through the dark woods, eventually finding refuge in the garage of a local man named Orville Miller. The next morning, Irving forced Miller at gunpoint to drive him to the nearest bus station, where he began his journey to the west coast.⁽²⁾

It's not clear if Irving had a plan to get movie work in Hollywood; I assume he simply headed for a distant city far from Brooklyn where he could vanish. It didn't work, though, as Pittsburgh Phil found out where he was and sent a hitman called Sholomon Bernstein to kill him. Years later, as the Murder, Inc trials drew to an end and Pittsburgh Phil had been sent to the electric chair, Bernstein said:

"I went to California to kill Big Gangi. But I didn't kill him. I got Big Gangi a job as an extra in the movies. I had connections out there."⁽³⁾

So, for a couple of years, Irving made a quiet living as a crowd-scene extra. Using the name Jack Gordon, he hid himself in plain view, his image flickering for a moment now and then across screens in every town in the country, and things were going just fine -- until Pretty Levine talked to the DA from Brooklyn, and Irving was extradited to New York to stand trial for the murder of Walter Sage.

The Hollywood connection made a nice angle for the reporters, who photographed a particularly sorry-looking Irving as he returned to the east coast:

 ⁽⁴⁾

Irving's escape plan had fallen apart. He'd outrun murderers in the Catskills, managed to get himself safely across the country and somehow convinced a hired killer in Los Angeles to not only spare his life, but also get him work in Hollywood and, presumably, lie to Pittsburgh Phil, but now he had to sit in court and listen to Pretty Levine telling the jury about the night he'd helped to murder his best friend, about how he'd reached from the back of the car to pin Sage to his seat while Drucker plunged the icepick into Sage's body again and again -- 32 times, in total. The blood must have been awful.

Irving couldn't take it. The next day's papers read:

"Irving (Big Gangi) Cohen, movie extra on trial for murder, wept today when a witness accused him of participating in the fatal stabbing of Walter Sage, Brooklyn gangster. 'This man is lying. I wasn't there, honestly,' Cohen sobbed."⁽⁵⁾

Irving -- this 260-pound giant -- rose from his seat and wailed hysterically that he was innocent. His lawyer was unable to calm him, and cried for help. A deputy sheriff led Irving from the court, which was suspended for a quarter of an hour while he pulled himself together.

The trial lasted eight days; the jury's deliberations lasted an hour and a half, and the result surprised everyone: the jury had bought Irving's story! Swayed by his emotional denials, they acquitted him. Irving was reported to have cried softly when his sobbing wife, Eva, rushed to his side.

There was only one thing Irving wanted to do. Immediately after the trial, perhaps with cheeks still glistening with tears of relief, he announced to reporters that, now that he had been cleared of all wrong-doing, he was going to dedicate himself to his career as a bit-part actor:

 ⁽⁶⁾

Even though Irving's alias had been busted during the trial, he kept using it for professional purposes. However, the name "Jack Gordon" doesn't appear to have been entered in any studio's records until 1944, four years after the trial, which might suggest that, even though the law was no longer a threat, he was still too scared of his old mob associates to take anything other than the most anonymous, man-in-a-crowd parts. It's probably not a coincidence that 1944 was the year in which Jack Drucker, who Irving had last seen holding a blood-stained icepick in a menacing manner, was finally arrested and sentenced to life in jail.

For the rest of the 1940s, Irving lumbered through B-movies in the sort of bit-parts that you'd expect a hulking, gorilla-like ex-gangster to attract. His finest hour came in 1945, when he played a silent gunman whose bosses use him to rub out rival gangsters. This role enabled Irving to leave us with a performance that we can only accept as a uniquely well-informed portrait of a hired killer, sculpted from a deep and visceral knowledge of the subject.

It's hardly Irving's fault that the subject's actually kind of banal.

A great deal of the job of the hitman, as interpreted by Irving, consists of tracking a target while wearing a slack, blank expression:

Those hours culminate in the shooting of the target, which is accomplished without a change of expression:

And that moment of excitement is followed by the arrest and imprisonment of the hitman, which, as expected by this point, brings about no change in the hitman's expression:

The film is called Crime, Inc. Although it's only a cheap little supporting feature, Irving must have been gratified to have been cast in it, as it's the first cinematic telling of the story of his old gang, and he gets to rub out not only a few gang bosses, but also a thinly disguised version of that dirty, no-good stool pigeon, Pretty Levine.

I don't know if that constitutes a satisfactory revenge, but it's closer than most people get. Take that, Murder, Inc!

After 1950, with the decline of the mobster genre, Irving's type fell out of fashion and his stream of small roles dried up. His last reported job was as a stand-in for Hoss Cartwright in the 1960s TV show, Bonanza.

Irving died in the mid-1970s. I don't know anything about his later life, apart from a few details that his grandchildren left on a website about old Jewish gangsters.⁽⁷⁾ They describe Irving as a loving, gentle man who smelled of cigars and alcohol and lived across from the Paramount studio with his wife, with whom he would speak privately in Yiddish. He had a nasty smoker's cough. He would take his false teeth out and chase the kids around the apartment with them. You know, the usual. They point out that Irving's part in Sage's murder was never proven, but admit that it wasn't a subject that the family spoke about, and that their father was, understandably, "very secretive about 'Grandpa'".

Sources: (1)"Murder, Inc - The Story of the Syndicate", Turkus, Burton B and Feder, Sid, Gollancz, London, 1952, pp41 to 43; (2)Kingston Daily Freeman, NY, June 19, 1940; (3)Oakland Tribune, Oct 30, 1941; (4)Kingston Daily Freeman, NY, June 22, 1940; (5)New York Times, June 18, 1940; (6)Kingston Daily Freeman, NY, June 22, 1940; (7)sixforfive.blogspot.com, post:"Big Gangy Cohen Found".

Dorothy Abbott

If I were to call my local police station and explain that a run-down old vaudeville mind reader called Triton the Mental Wizard had told me I was going to die at 11 o'clock that night, I wouldn't have high hopes of seeing a great deal of cop action any time soon. However, according to Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), I'd be wrong, because, when Gail Russell makes that very call, the LAPD gets peculiarly over-excited and floods her mansion with dozens of flatfoots, who quickly secure the place against any possible threat.

Just goes to show.

As the lead detective is shown into the drawing room, a maid passes by, carrying an empty silver tray:

She's played by Dorothy Abbott, who is about 20 minutes away from speaking her first line in a motion picture. The police have thrown a cordon around the house, and are allowing no one in or out. The hours pass by, 11 o'clock draws nearer, and everyone grows increasingly tense. Halfway through the evening, a couple of cops bring in someone they found trying to creep out through the garden. It's Dorothy:

They ask her why she was running away, and she answers timidly, with a foreign accent that's unplaceable but is presumably supposed to be generally evocative of the superstitious old world: "When a person's fated, others go with them."

That's the line! Dorothy talks!

The heiress lets the maid go, and that's the end of Dorothy's part in the film. It's not a huge or pivotal role, but it helps with the atmosphere of melodramatic dread, which is pretty important in a film that doesn't have a great deal going on in terms of story after the initial set-up. Also, it means that Dorothy's no longer a mere extra -- two years after leaving her secretary's job in Missouri and coming to Hollywood, she's got a speaking role! She's an actress!

It wasn't too bad a start, but it didn't come to much. She'd been getting steady work as a pretty extra for the two years she'd been in the business, being cast regularly as show girls, models, nurses and girls at parties, and things don't seem to have changed much after she delivered her one line. The small parts kept coming, but none of them involved much in the way of speaking. She couldn't work it out. Why didn't they want her to speak? Naturally, she assumed the problem was something to do with her voice, in which she detected an unattractive huskiness. She spent her first three years in Hollywood trying to develop a smoother tone, until one day in 1950, when her drama coach told her that her husky voice was the only thing that made her different from any other pretty girl. That was better than nothing, she figured, and, from then on, she spent a good deal of time screaming at trees in her back yard whenever she got worried that her voice might not be quite husky enough.⁽¹⁾

All that screaming doesn't seem to have helped with the speaking roles, though. Here she is in His Kind of Woman (1951), released the year after she discovered her unique selling point:

She's on the right, obviously.

It must have been thrilling to sit and play cards at a table with Robert Mitchum, but she doesn't get to say anything to him, or anyone else in the scene.

She spent a few years under contract to Paramount as a stock player, dutifully showing up to silently beautify whatever scenes she was assigned. A syndicated column covering the colourful fringes of life in the film colony, James Padgitt's "In Hollywood", once dedicated a few paragraphs to her, saying, "Dorothy is one of the legion of girls who tried to crash into the big time at the studios, but finally became content with small parts, walk-ons and the cutie second from the left in the chorus line." She told Padgitt that she worked days at the studio and nights in little theatre productions. She also did promotional modelling work: "They'll make me queen of something or other or Miss This or Miss That for a little extra cash." When the article appeared, she'd recently gloried in the roles of Miss Los Angeles Transit and Miss Oil Cans. "I make a pretty good living," she said. "At least it keeps the wolf from the door."⁽²⁾

That took care of money, but what about the glamour and excitement that she'd dreamed of back when she was a secretary in Kansas City? Well, she got that, too, but not in the way she might have expected. While other hopeful starlets were chasing actors and producers in the Cocoanut Grove and the Brown Derby, Dorothy met a man from the other Los Angeles, a Mescalero Apache cop in the narcotics squad called Rudy Diaz. He was much more exciting than all those movie people. Dorothy might have thought it was pretty thrilling to play cards with Robert Mitchum on a film set, but how much more thrilling would it have been to have taken part in the undercover drugs bust that ended up with Mitchum going to jail after the cops, including Rudy, crashed the little marijuana party that he was enjoying in a small apartment in Laurel Canyon?⁽³⁾

Rudy got up to all kinds of dramatic stuff. In 1949, a couple of years before Dorothy met him, he got in the papers when an undercover operation went wrong in a bad way. As Rudy was handcuffing a dope peddler who'd just sold him seven reefers, a man with a deputy sheriff's badge walked up and said, "I'm from the sheriff's department. Can I help you?" The news reports explained what happened next:

"Instead of help, the phony deputy hit Diaz over the head with a gun butt. Diaz fell and the 'deputy' aimed his gun at the officer and pulled the trigger five times. It never went off.

"Diaz got up and collared the 'deputy'. The peddler fled in the scuffle.

"The narcotics officer then drove the other prisoner toward Central police station. En route, two cars hemmed the police car to the curb. The 'deputy' leaped into one of them.

The narcotics officer then went to a hospital to have some head and hand cuts treated."⁽⁴⁾

So he's a cop disguised as a drug addict who's almost killed by a drug dealer disguised as a cop? That's Dorothy's man! Maybe it would have been better for her career if she'd hooked up with someone with a bit more pull in the film world, but that's not the way it worked out. She fell in love with Rudy, and that was all there was to it.

Rudy was crazy about her, too -- so crazy that, even though he knew it was a terrible idea, she was able to talk him into letting her tag along on an undercover job. His instincts were proved right when, much to his regret, this move ended up giving the papers another embarrassing story:

"Dorothy's husband is dashing Rudy Diaz, narcotics squad officer and the terror of the local 'hypes.' The two have only been married two weeks so Rudy's in a frame of mind to do just about anything this little blonde girl should ask. You'd think being an actress was glamorous enough. But not for Dorothy, an adventuress at heart.

"Dorothy talked her husband into letting her come along when he was out on a case. She posed as his 'pickup' date.

"Rudy slicked down his hair and dressed himself in a loose fitting bright blue suit with heavily padded shoulders. He was like any of those characters wandering about Temple and Figueroa streets.

"Dorothy smeared on the grease paint so she'd look like a girl who'd do 'anything' for the stuff.

"The couple met their 'contact' outside a Los Angeles movie theater. The contact was going to lead them to where they could buy some narcotics. Rudy was posing as a guy named Jack. It had taken him several months to get in with the gang. Things were going swimmingly.

"Then Dorothy blurted out, 'Rudy, I've got to make a phone call.'

"Rudy, keeping in character as Jack, another junko, ignored her. But determined Dorothy, out of character, tugged at his sleeve, 'Rudy, Rudy,' she insisted."

The suspect suddenly realised what was going on and ran off. Rudy let him go, because you can't abandon your wife in a bad neighbourhood while she's dressed as a prostitute, and the news story attributed to him a laconic, and fittingly Mitchum-like, closing line: "Baby, your kind of acting's strictly for movies."⁽⁵⁾

You don't get that sort of story if you marry a movie producer. And, in fact, it turned out that marrying Rudy wasn't as bad for Dorothy's career as it might have seemed at first. 

The television show, Dragnet, prided itself on its realism, and would often use actual cases as the basis for Joe Friday's investigations. In the early 50s, the show picked a couple of Rudy's cases to dramatise, and took Rudy on as a technical adviser. Not only that, it also took on Dorothy as a regular character: she got to play Friday's girlfriend, Ann Baker:

The role of the main character's girlfriend might be a pretty big deal in most TV series, but Dragnet really wasn't the kind of show that spent a lot of time on its heroes' personal lives -- Just the facts, Ma'am -- and Dorothy wasn't given too much to do in the six episodes (out of 300) that she appeared in. Still, Dragnet was massive for a while, and she was Joe Friday's girl. That's the kind of exposure every young actress dreams of. It's the kind of break that can take you places.

But it didn't take her anywhere. Her credits following her spell on Dragnet include the usual dancing girls and nurses that someone had obviously decided were all she was fit for.

For Rudy, though, the Dragnet experience panned out differently. While Dorothy had found her way, through Rudy, to an exciting Los Angeles that was far from the one she'd been expecting, Rudy found a way, through Dragnet, to the Los Angeles that Dorothy had moved west to be a part of: a Los Angeles that was filled with glamorous, charismatic men and beautiful, sophisticated women, where creative people valued your opinions and trusted your advice and, crucially, nobody tried to shoot you in the face at point blank range.

It set Rudy thinking. There was more to life, maybe, than chasing drug pushers and living in a cramped little place with the wife's mother and your daughter always hanging around.⁽⁶⁾ He stayed in the police, moving from narcotics to homicide, but it seems that his eyes had been opened, and he was looking for new possibilities. 

I've no idea when exactly things went wrong between Dorothy and Rudy, but, by the 1960s, they weren't living together, and Rudy was following his hunch that Hollywood had more to offer than dope busts and murders. In 1964, a gossip columnist noted: "Ann Sothern's been doing the everynight pheasant en cocotte bit (with a split or two of Chateau Cheval Blanc on the side) with handsome Sergeant Rudy Diaz of the Los Angeles Police Department's Homicide Division -- and believe me, they ain't discussing homicide."⁽⁷⁾ Rudy and Sothern were still together the following year, when they were photographed together at a Hollywood party:

  ⁽⁸⁾

Then, a few years later, after serving for 21 years, Rudy left the LAPD and became an actor. He said, "I've been on the force for 21 years. I didn't know it, but I guess I must have been practicing for acting all those years I was posing as an undercover man."⁽⁹⁾ One of his first roles, as the guy Clint Eastwood arrests in the first scenes of Coogan's Bluff (1968) seems pretty typical of his career:

Dorothy had stopped acting the same year Rudy was spotted with Ann Sothern. Perhaps that's not a coincidence. After a few years of separation, Dorothy and Rudy got a divorce. It was 1968, the same year Coogan's Bluff came out.

At the end of the year, just before Christmas, Dorothy killed herself. There's no record of how she did it, or who found her, or whether she left a note to explain why she'd done it. She was 46.

Rudy outlived her by almost 40 years, spending the rest of his career as a character actor specialising in various tough cops, native Americans and Mexican bandits. He retired in 1983, and died just before Christmas in 2006 at the age of 88.

Sources: imdb.com; (1)Ogden Standard-Examiner Aug 15 1950; (2)The Doylestown Intelligencer, (Pa), June 5, 1951; (3)Starks, Michael "Cocaine Fiends and Reefer Madness",  By Michael Starks, Cornwall Books, 1982, p129; (4)San Mateo Times, Nov 14, 1949; (5)Pacific Stars & Stripes, Sep 4, 1952; (6)Elyria Chronicle-Telegram, July 16, 1955; (7)Pasadena Star-News, Nov 27, 1964; (8)The Daily Review (Cal), Jan 26, 1965 (9)San Antonio Light, Oct 20, 1967.

Hymie Miller

"Shuddup, you mugs! I got something to say! Prohibition is over, and it's the birth of a new day for us! From now on, Marko is legitimate!"

In this early scene in A Slight Case of Murder (1938), Edward G Robinson's crime boss explains his plan for a new, strictly legal, operation to his appalled henchmen, played by a great bunch of tough-guy character actors, some of whom crop up in dozens of crime films around this time.

 

We're only interested in one of the goons, however. A guy called Hymie Miller, an extra so insignificant that he has only one IMDB credit to his name, although he was in a few more films than that, including this one. You can't miss him; he's the guy in the hat. No? Okay, he's the guy right in front of the door. This guy:

 

I only know it's him because, three months before the film was released, Hymie was killed, and a newspaper printed this picture, which has a helpful floating arrow of doom above his head: 

⁽¹⁾   

The caption under the picture notes that the film was "a strange coincidental prelude to his own death", which I suppose is true enough.

Here's what happened. Late on Sunday, 14 November, 1937, Hymie Miller locked up the delicatessen that he part-owned, a busy little hang-out off Hollywood Boulevard, and walked home to the Halifax apartments on Yucca Avenue. The night clerk saw him enter the lobby with a man he didn't recognise and go upstairs. Ten minutes later, he saw the man running down the stairs "three steps at a time".⁽²⁾ Before he could decide what to do, his phone rang. It was Hymie, who said: "Quick! Get a doctor! I've been shot!"⁽³⁾ The next day, this news story appeared: 

⁽⁴⁾

The story said: "A gunman fired four shots at close range into Hymie Miller, 31, movie actor and Hollywood cafe owner, as Miller lay in bed in his apartment early today. Miller, cast in the picture "Robin Hood" and many others in minor roles, was wounded critically. His nose was shot off, and bullets pierced his neck, left hand and right thigh ... The gun was held so close to Miller that each shot left a powder burn."

 

He was rushed to hospital, where he gave the police a statement that the night clerk's story, which hadn't yet been heard by the police, would later seem to contradict: "I heard a noise in the room and woke up," he said. "I saw a man dimly in the darkness. Before I could rise up in bed, he fired at me."  Leaving aside the fact that that sounds amazingly lucid for a man whose nose has just been shot off (I assume that's simply due to an innocent lack of care on the part of the police transcriber), what about the mysterious stranger who had walked Hymie home? Hymie didn't mention him; he just told the police that he couldn't give a description of the gunman and said that he had no enemies who might want to kill him. Perhaps, he suggested, the intruder had meant to rob him and had shot him accidentally. 

Before leaving him to the doctors, a photographer took this picture, which the papers were able to use in their stories about his death the next day: 

 ⁽⁶⁾

It took the police more than a week to pick someone up for the murder. Ten days after Hymie died, they raided the set of Robin Hood (the Errol Flynn version, released the next year, 1938), on which Hymie had been getting some work, and arrested an extra called Johnny Fisher, who they'd been told had been seen arguing with Hymie over a girl. The press, which had for some reason decided to take a light-hearted approach to its coverage of the investigation, got decent comic mileage out of the latest development:

 

"Out at the Adolphus Gardens in Pasadena, where Warner Brothers studio has built a replica of the castle of Nottingham for the filming of 'Robin Hood', the agents of Prosecutor Buron Fitts nabbed ... Fisher, who was disporting himself among the jolly archers, pikemen and cross-bowmen of that legendary bandit who was supposed to have shared his loot with the poor. 

"Fitts' raiders elbowed through the band of movie outlaws and knights in armour just as the merry men were discarding their green forestry suits for peasant goatskins and were making ready to sneak into Nottingham under the very nose of the legendary sheriff to steal the show at a knightly jousting.

"Over the drawbridge came Fitts' men, with modern arms and a John Doe warrant ... And Fisher was dragged off to jail, goatskin suit, leather hat and all. His part was so small that he wasn't even missed from the cast and the filming was resumed."⁽⁷⁾

This is what the Adolphus Busch Gardens in Pasadena looked like that day. Depending on how much of the scene had been shot before the raid took place, Fisher could be one of the extras in this shot:

The detectives worked on Fisher overnight, interrogating him and his roommates, Jack Lumiere and Harry Fielman, who were also movie extras. Investigator John Klein said that the police were able to get "considerable information" out of them, including the fact that Fisher and Hymie had been together until three hours before Miller was shot. Although they decided that Fisher hadn't been the man who shot Hymie, it didn't mean they liked him or wanted him around town. They charged all three men with vagrancy and gave them 24 hours to leave town or face a jail sentence.⁽⁷⁾ (Apparently, the LAPD used to do this all the time when they couldn't make a charge stick on a suspect.)

 

Fisher initially pled guilty to the charge of vagrancy, but then changed his mind and hired a couple of lawyers to fight his case so he could stay in town. In light of later events, this was probably a mistake.

The interrogation had led the police into some interesting areas. They'd learned that Hymie's delicatessen was frequented mainly by small-time criminals and shady characters -- people who "had been known to handle a few race bets and dabble in vice" -- and that some of them worked from time to time, like Hymie and Fisher, as movie extras. Following these leads, they heard rumours that gangsters from New York had moved into the fringes of the motion picture business, that there was "a gigantic, sinister motion picture extra racket in which thousands were victimized" and that Hymie himself had in some way been able to control the calls for work from casting bureaus.⁽⁸⁾

 

How about that? While all those other guys on the set of A Slight Case of Murder that day were striking their best tough-guy poses and trying their hardest to come off like ruthless gangsters, they were standing right beside the real thing. I wonder how many of them knew.

 

The press jumped on the story:

 

"A surprised Hollywood found the makings of a real life gangster plot in its lap today, with a squad of special "gang busting" detectives investigating what was believed a racket collecting thousands of dollars in tribute weekly from movie extras.

 

"District Attorney Buron Fitts claimed to possess evidence that eastern gangsters have invaded Hollywood and are 'organizing' the movie extras ... Hundreds of them, Fitts said it was indicated, must share their pay checks with racketeers who control their jobs. If they fail to pay, they join the army of jobless."⁽⁹⁾

 

The DA took pains to emphasise that the racket was operating outside the Central Casting Bureau, which prided itself on its ability to impartially allocate jobs to Hollywood's 12,000 registered extras using what it called a "mechanical device". Fitts stressed that the gangsters operated through various clubs that were organised among the extras.

 

The investigation into the extras racket became the DA's priority, and  Fisher, the Robin Hood extra who should have been smart enough to get out of town when he had the chance, was rearrested as part of that case.  Hymie's murder, now officially divorced from the major investigation, was left to "four sleuths" to solve.⁽¹⁰⁾

 

In charge of the sleuths was Detective Lieutenant H Leslie Wildey, who had a great idea. That night clerk at Hymie's apartment building -- he'd seen the murderer twice: once walking upstairs and once running downstairs. Why not show him some photographs of some of those shady types from Hymie's delicatessen? Sure enough, the night clerk picked out a picture of Dennis "Danny" Wilson, a former New York prize-fighter and, more recently, movie extra.⁽¹¹⁾ Two other witnesses identified Wilson as the man they'd seen talking to Hymie in the delicatessen earlier that evening.

 

 

That's the guy!

 

But Wilson had skipped town, and was last seen leaving San Francisco for an unknown destination. Further work by the four sleuths revealed that Wilson was, in fact, an east-coast gang member called James Iannone, who, two years earlier, had escaped from a patrol wagon in Brooklyn after being arrested for robbery and had vanished from the New York scene.

 

The police discovered that Hymie and Iannone had operated an extortion racket in New York until Iannone's disappearance, and surmised that Hymie had followed his partner out west to continue the same business in Hollywood. Detective Warren Hudson told the press: "Miller and Iannone, in addition to the 'loan shark' racket, had been engaged here in 'strong-arm jobs', and had, through connection with individuals at film studios, obtained jobs for extras, who in turn had to 'cut' their pay with the pair."⁽¹²⁾

 

The racket was worth thousands of dollars a week, which would be quite a haul even now, and Hymie must have got a decent share of it, even assuming that he had to kick back most of the money to his bosses. Yet he spent his days as an extra, hanging around movie sets for a few dollars a shift. Was his presence on set a reminder to the "genuine" extras that the mobsters had their eye on them? Maybe, but there are only a few non-character actor extras in Hymie's scene in A Slight Case of Murder, so he wouldn't have intimidated many people that day.

 

Perhaps, like all those other nameless hopefuls who've packed in whatever they've been doing and headed for Hollywood, he simply -- and even rather endearingly -- wanted to see himself up on that screen. If a soda jerk or cigarette girl can dream of being discovered and becoming a big movie star, why not a small-time goon?

 

Whatever the case, evidently, something eventually soured Hymie and Iannone's partnership -- some sources said they'd argued over money, some said they'd both gone for the same girl, a blonde called Evelyn Mittelman, others said the gang were worried that Hymie might talk to the police --  and Hymie ended up getting shot in the face. 

 

It wasn't until 1940, more than two years after Hymie was killed, that Iannone was arrested.⁽¹³⁾ Whether he was convicted, I don't know, as the outcome of the case doesn't seem to have been reported (which probably means that he got off). I can say that, whatever the result, he was certainly out by 1950, when he was arrested for killing two witnesses in a narcotics trial,⁽¹⁴⁾ and that he dodged a conviction in that case, too, because he was still active in labour racketeering in 1960, when he was named in a senate investigation.⁽¹⁵⁾ He doesn't seem to have ever seen the inside of a jail cell, which is probably a bit of a shame.

 

And what of Johnny Fisher, the goatskin-clad merry man who was wrongly arrested on suspicion of Hymie's murder and rightly rearrested on suspicion of racketeering? Just after Christmas in 1937, he was put on trial, and three extras -- Benny Baker, Barney Dean and Henry Malton -- testified that he had operated a loan syndicate that was described as involving "one of the 'most colossal' examples of usurous interest rates in recent local history", with loans being made to extras at interest of roughly 1040 per cent a year.⁽¹⁶⁾ On the last day of 1937, Fisher was sent to jail. There seems to have been no doubt that there were other, more senior figures in the racket, but they couldn't be found. Apart from Hymie Miller, of course, but he'd already been taken care of.

 

The report on the trial doesn't detail Fisher's sentence, but it couldn't have been too lengthy, because, a few years later, he showed up back in Hollywood, a movie extra once again. Here he is in a small role as a murderous henchman in Dark Mountain (1944):

 

 

He's the one on the right; the one who isn't Elisha Cook Jr. They're about to drop that packing crate from a great height in order to squash a stupid cop who's about to ruin a perfectly good racket by sticking his big nose into their business.

 

I have no doubt that he appreciated the irony, and that he relished every moment of this scene.  

 

Sources:   (1)The Hammond Times, Nov 23, 1937 (2)and(11)Albuquerque Journal, Nov 27 1937 (3)and(12)Hollywood Noir; Olsen, Richard; XLibris Corporation, 2001 (4)The Oelwein Daily Register, Nov 15 1937 (5)and(8)Dunkirk (NY) Evening Observer, Dec 1 1937 (6)and(7)Jefferson City Post Tribune, Nov 23 1937 (9)The Fresno Bee, Nov 24, 1937 (10)Albuquerque Journal, Nov 25, 1937 (13)The Fresno Bee, March 23 1940 (14)Reno Evening Gazette, March 6 1950 (15)The Oakland Tribune, March 28 1960 (16)Nevada State Journal, Dec 30 1930; mugshot of James Iannone taken from the 1959 report of the Senate Subcommittee on Racketeering.

Miriam Franklin

The chorus line of a show called Panama Hattie, which ran on Broadway from 1940 to 1942, was remarkable. In it were June Allyson, Vera-Ellen, Betsy Blair and Doris and Constance Dowling. They were unknown at the time, and, let's face it, they're more or less unknown now, but they were all once pretty famous.

June Allyson was voted number one female box office attraction in the country for six consecutive years in the 40s and 50s. Vera-Ellen starred opposite Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and the Marx Brothers (not all at the same time, although that would have been a great film). Betsy Blair married Gene Kelly, and was Oscar nominated for her starring role in Marty (1955). The Dowling sisters achieved a kind of second-tier fame as supporting actors in the 40s -- interestingly, in 1946, Constance played the no-good singer who Dan Duryea is accused of murdering in The Black Angel and Doris played the no-good wife who Alan Ladd is accused of murdering in The Blue Dahlia.

But also on that chorus line -– that movie star factory! –- was a woman whose only speaking role appears to have been this:

“Mr Neff?” she says, interrupting Fred MacMurray’s internal monologue in Double Indemnity (1944), “Mr Keyes wants to see you. He's been yelling for you all afternoon.” And that’s the end of her scene.

Her name is Miriam Franklin. The year before her two sentences in Double Indemnity, she made her first appearance in the papers, as the Broadway chorus girl that she then was. The gossip columnist, Dorothy Kilgallen, made Miriam the subject of a piece that, she promised her readers, was slightly different from the usual carbon-copy stories of showfolk lore, such as “the trite and true tale of the understudy who wows an amazed audience after she breathlessly steps into the star’s wardrobe and the star’s role at the 11th hour”. She explained that Miriam, “a svelte young beauty with eyes like cornflowers”, had been the captain of the chorus girls in a Broadway show called Let's Face It for a year when she was chosen to be the understudy for Sunny O'Dea and Nanette Fabray, two of the stars. Every chorine’s wish come true! So how did it go? “Well, week followed week and month followed month and Miriam hoped against hope while the seemingly indestructible Misses O'Dea and Fabray danced and danced and sang and sang and never showed a bit of mileage or the slightest signs of weakening even to the point of a small head cold.”

Then, in January 1943, the miracle happened: Sunny O'Dea became ill and was out of the show for several performances, and Nanette Fabray quit to work on another show. At last, Miriam’s time had come! But not quite -- as it turned out, she didn't get either of the roles. “You see,” Kilgallen concluded, “Miriam is adoringly married to Sergt. Gene Berg, of 'This is the Army' [Irving Berlin’s wartime propaganda revue]. And, just one night before Sunny O’Dea fell ill, Miriam—lonely for her soldier boy—left to accompany him to the west coast!”⁽¹⁾

That's the Dorothy Kilgallen spin on the story -- a romantic young girl unwittingly sacrifices her first and only shot at the big time to be with the man she loves. Talk about trite and true.

In reality, Miriam and Gene were headed west anyway. Who needs Broadway when you've got Hollywood just sitting there? Sure, it wouldn't have hurt to have gone out there with a lead role or two on the résumé, but, really, Hollywood didn't rate all that fancy New York stuff too much anyway.

So Gene changed his name from Berg to Nelson, following Miriam’s example (she’d ditched her inconveniently non-gentile name, Frankel, years before), and the pair of them set about getting into the movies.

Miriam got work as a choreographer, which paid the bills, and then started to get small dancing roles. Here she is in the opening scene of Hail the Conquering Hero (1944):

She’s pretty good, too. This showy move, a twisting leap across the small stage, is thrown away as if it’s nothing:

She’s the star of the film for about five seconds before she recedes into the background as another bit-part actor walks into the frame and the fickle camera drifts off after him:

 

But Miriam seems to have appeared in films for only two years -- 1944 to 1946 -- and almost all of those parts were either small dancing roles or walk-ons. What happened? It’s hard to know for sure, obviously, but it’s perhaps significant that her career died just before Gene’s started to take off.

When Gene got a contract at 20^th Century Fox in 1947, Miriam quit her job as a dance director at Warners. Apparently, "Gene asked her to hand in her resignation because ‘she's too great a dancer to be passing out routines to girls who can't touch her.’"⁽²⁾ Why should she neglect her own career while helping those anonymous hoofers, Gene reasoned, when she could be neglecting her career just as much while helping only him?

And that’s what happened. From then on, according the various puff pieces that accompanied Gene’s growing fame, Miriam was Gene’s personal, full-time choreographer: “Now Mrs Nelson helps him work out all his dance routines and practices them with him. He insists on having her on the set when he is making a picture.”⁽³⁾ In a few interviews around that time, Gene proudly explained that he and Miriam would work on his dance routines at all hours, whenever inspiration struck them.

What a team!

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a wife or husband putting their career on hold so the energies of the partnership can be focused on the career of the other one. It happens all the time. What’s not so great, however, is when, after one of the partners has become a popular success, he has a very public affair with a co-star, ditches his wife and marries a secretary at MGM who’s 12 years his junior, which is how it went with Miriam and Gene.⁽⁴⁾

Perhaps that’s an unfair characterisation of poor old Gene, who seems to have been a nice enough guy -- well, his Will Parker in Oklahoma! (1955) seemed nice, anyway -- but those are the facts, and they certainly don’t look too pretty.

After the divorce, Miriam didn't try to get back in to acting -- she was over 30 and, if she was going to make it as an actress, she'd have made it by then. Instead, she returned to choreography (using her married name of Nelson; a professionally useful reminder of her association with a famous dancer). This time, with Gene no longer demanding a monopoly of her skills, she was a great success, and ended up directing routines in films, television shows and even back on Broadway in a career that continued well into her 70s.

She'll be 89 this year and, incredibly, as you can seen in this video (shot at the 2007 Fruitcake Follies, a little Hollywood Christmas variety show), she's still dancing:

Sources: (1)Lowell Sun, Jan 16, 1943; (2)Modesto Bee and News Herald, Sept 18, 1952; (3)The Paris News, Oct 5, 1950; (4) Chester Times (PA) Aug 8, 1953.

Dick Winslow

I often think how great it would have been to be Hoagy Carmichael -- to sing, play the piano, act in movies and hang out with Lauren Bacall, sometimes all at once:

 

The still's from To Have and Have Not (1944). You never come across scenes like that these days, of course, but, in the 40s, piano-led singalongs seem to have broken out spontaneously in any room in which more than two people were gathered. Certainly, no cinematic social gathering could call itself a party without a piano -- upright, cocktail or grand -- and a young man to play it. Preferably Hoagy Carmichael.

But what did they do when Hoagy was busy? Often, they got hold of Dick Winslow, who can be seen in this still from The Blue Dahlia (1946):

Alan Ladd's just come home from the war to find this wild party going on in his house. You can tell it's a wild party because someone's left their fur coat on the piano. Dick's playing "Accentuate the Positive" as all the guests sing along, but Alan Ladd's more in the mood to accentuate an unpleasant argument with his unfaithful wife, and Dick has to stop playing when everyone gets thrown out of the house.

It's a pretty typical role for Dick, who seems to have always been ready to fill out a scene with some inconsequential piano noodling whenever called on to do so. His filmography includes all the usual reporters, barmen and waiters that make up the bit-part actor's staple roles, but is noticeably heavy on musicians, particularly violinists, bandleaders, concertina players and accordionists. He'd been performing music for years, making his first appearance in the papers at the age of 10:

⁽¹⁾

That was around the time he started work in the movies, a career chosen for him by his mother, according to a 1946 movie-gossip snippet, which says: "The late Mrs Winona Breazole Johnson landed her youngsters -- all seven of them -- in films by writing a scenario for Harry Carey with supporting parts tailored for her children. That was 25 years ago, and all are still in pictures."⁽²⁾ It doesn't say what they're doing in pictures, of course, as that would rather spoil the story. The ones I can trace -- Kenneth, Cullen and Carmencita Johnson -- were all bit-part actors, like Dick, but without his musical specialism. Imagine: a whole family of unsung Joes!

I don't know about the rest of his family, but I get the impression that Dick didn't mind the parade of small roles he got. The career of an extra, rather than being a depressing purgatory that must be endured while waiting for the big break that never comes, seems to have suited him quite well. Okay, so he wasn't Hoagy Carmichael, but there's no evidence that he was dissatisfied with his bit-parts; he never tried to make a mark by taking a featured role in a poverty row picture, for example. He doesn't seem to have longed to be a famous movie star or, indeed, to be famous at all. He wanted to make music, and he appears to have been very good at it.

For decades, he was the resident pianist and entertainer at various Los Angeles restaurants and clubs. During the war, he entertained the troops overseas with the USO. Here's a picture of him and some other volunteers serving in an army canteen:

⁽³⁾

It's really a picture of Mickey Rooney clowning around, obviously, but you can just make out Dick at the left. He's the guy with the downcast eyes, way back in the shadows. Dick wasn't the kind of guy to hog the limelight. He didn't mind; he knew his place. 

He spent some time in the late 1940s and 1950s touring supper-clubs with a singer called Carol Ann Beery, the daughter of Wallace Beery, and, towards the end of the 1950s, he scored this very special on-going gig:

⁽⁴⁾

A champagne tour by plane from Los Angeles to Las Vegas featuring Dick Winslow on the Sky Piano! What could be better? A newspaper interview that Dick gave after his 633rd flight is wonderfully evocative of a small, forgotten corner of the vanished pre-Beatles, pre-Vietnam, pre-Lee Harvey Oswald 1960s. After explaining how his piano is bolted on to the floor of the plane, Dick talks about loosening up the passengers with champagne and a bit of "community singing": "The first thing I do is pass song books to passengers as they get aboard. They don't even know when we take off and land. As soon as we can unfasten our seat belts, we get 18 or 20 people around the piano and we all start singing. Tonight, we had three people from Argentina aboard who couldn't speak English. So I played a tango for them. An Australian got 'Waltzing Matilda.' One girl started to do a strip tease in the aisle. We couldn't have that, though." On the way back from Vegas, after everyone had been robbed blind by the casino, Dick would often have to loan money to "guys who didn't have enough dough to get their car from the airport parking lot". None of it was ever paid back, though. ⁽⁵⁾

It would make a fantastic episode of Mad Men.

Although he was primarily a pianist, Dick, like Hoagy Carmichael, was a multi-instrumentalist, and could play the marimba, the bag pipes, the saxophone and many other noise-making devices. In his later years, although he was still playing the piano in Hollywood restaurants and appearing in bit-parts on television, he decided to capitalise on his multi-instrumentalism in a way that Hoagy Carmichael never did. A small aside in an article from 1977 notes that Dick, at the age of 62, "delights in carrying 65 pounds on his back as a one-man band and making up lyrics for each charity event where he plays." ⁽⁶⁾

His one-man band act enlivened cinema screens only once, in Do Not Disturb (1965), in which he serenaded Doris Day in a Parisian cafe:

His 10-year-old self would have been proud.

Of course it would have been great to be Hoagy Carmichael, but, if you couldn't be him, it mustn't have been too bad to be Dick Winslow.

Dick died in 1991, at the age of 76.

Sources: (1)Constitution Tribune, 20 August, 1928; (2)Joplin Globe, 19 July, 1946; (3)Public domain, via Wikimedia; (4)Long Beach Press-Telegram, 4 February, 1960; (5)Kingsport Times, 30 Sept 1960; (6)Star News, 24 May, 1977

Victoria Vinton

Victoria Vinton wouldn't have had to wait long to see herself in Bullets or Ballots (1936), as she's up there on screen in the first shot of the film. She'd have recognised the scene immediately, as it involves a great crane shot which starts high above a movie theater, then swoops down as a car pulls up and a couple of gangsters get out and walk over to the ticket booth, where she sits.

 

Perhaps she took a boyfriend to see the film with her, eager to impress him by showing him proof that she really had met Humphrey Bogart, who plays one of the gangsters, or maybe she went with her mother, who might have been visiting from New Jersey and been looking forward to sitting with her daughter while they both watched her act face-to-face with real-life movie stars.

Perhaps Victoria whispered, "This is it! This is my scene!" as the camera swung down to the level of her ticket booth. "That's me! You can't see my face yet because of that grill, but that's me!" 

 

"The gangsters are coming over to me to buy a ticket. You'll see me when the shot changes. Look!"

But this was the next shot:

 

Victoria is just outside the frame on the left. You hear her tell the gangsters what time the crime picture starts, but that's not quite the same thing.  

Victoria had been in Hollywood for six years or so by this point, and, obviously, things were not going well.

When she'd first come to town in 1931, she'd made a living as a model, showing up in glamorous costumes at publicity events for store openings and fairs. Here she is at the age of 19, in one of her first jobs:

 (1)

If the various bits of publicity in the newspapers over the years are anything to go by, absolutely everybody thought she was extraordinarily beautiful. For example, a celebrity portrait painter (and, apparently, compiler of peculiar lists) called Willy Pogany included her in his list of women who have "the most beautiful and the most nearly perfect shoulders"⁽²⁾ (she's the only non-famous name in a list that includes Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard and Ginger Rogers), and a photograph of her appeared in the press with the caption "Victoria Vinton is said by experts in pulchritude to be the prettiest chorus girl in Hollywood"⁽³⁾.

Perhaps those pulchritude experts influenced the decision to cast her in a lead role in the very first film that she appeared in. She must have been thrilled: her first film, and top billing already! I wonder how long it took her to realise that The Seventh Commandment (1932) was actually a rather seedy exploitation movie that would eventually be marketed by its producers as a "sex hygiene drama".

No copies of the film have survived, but here's what Joseph Breen, the admittedly puritanical film censor, said about it: "The whole play is the most thoroughly vile and disgusting motion picture which [our staff] have ever seen. It is thoroughly reprehensible in all its details. In addition, it is poorly produced and poorly photographed. The portion of the film given over to the Cesarean operation suggests a foreign picture ... The whole thing is very offensive and disgusting."⁽⁴⁾

Victoria's next roles were more subdued, and she spent the next few years appearing as chorus girls or various background blondes. Her highest profile part was in a short Busby Berkeley number in the middle of Fashions of 1934, in which she played a chorine who emerges from a mountain of feathers and stares fixedly at the audience like an early incarnation of the lady in the radiator from Eraserhead (1977):

Although she rarely got noteworthy roles, her publicist seems to have managed to keep her name in the papers throughout the 30s, usually by means of issuing a cheesecake shot of her in a swimsuit or something. However, in 1933, she featured in one genuine news item:

 ⁽⁵⁾

The story read: "Victoria Vinton, young motion picture actress, wept softly over a piece of soap in municipal court here Wednesday. 'I suppose that's all that's left of Duchess,' she said. 'Duchess was such a good pal.'

Thereafter, the soap exhibit and other testimony aiding, Jess Anderson and Morven Strange, screen cowboys, were held for trial on charges of stealing Miss Vinton's pet horse and selling it to a soap factory."⁽⁶⁾

Frustratingly, I can't find any record of the outcome of the trial, and the IMDB hasn't heard of the two actors, so we've no way of telling whether Victoria's remarkable ability to determine the precise horse from which a bar of soap was made was as accurate as she thought it was.

In the mid-30s, Victoria got a couple of lead roles in low-budget Westerns, but, on the whole, her career was made up of roles like the theater ticket seller in Bullets or Ballots. Perhaps she'd tarnished her reputation by appearing in The Seventh Commandment. Alternatively, maybe she was simply terrible at acting. Who knows? She had her own theory, naturally, which she explained to gossip columnist Paul Harrison, who was visiting the set of a film in which she had a bit part as one of the movie stars attending a premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater. The article bore this headline:

⁽⁷⁾

It explained that Victoria was offered nothing but bit parts because she looked so exactly like "a magazine illustrator's notion of a movie star" that casting directors appeared to be able to think of her only as a generic movie star type. "During seven years in Hollywood, she has had many such brief, anonymous roles. But never a chance to act!"

Of course, in those two brief sentences, Harrison gets the length of her career wrong and over-dramatises her situation by pretending that she had never had a speaking role, but the essence of the story is this: Victoria Vinton suspected that the reason she'd never become a movie star was that she was just too beautiful.

The article was published in 1940, the year in which Victoria appears to have given up trying to make it in Hollywood. She's credited with only one more small role, in 1944, and she died in 1980, in a nursing home for retired actors.

Sources -- IMDB.com, newspaperarchive.com, (1)Brainerd Daily Dispatch, Jan 19, 1931 (2)New Castle News, March 27, 1934 (3)Zanesville Signal, 1938 (4)Schaefer, Eric "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! A History of Exploitation Films 1919-1959", Duke University Press, 1999. (5)Standard-Examiner, January 29, 1933 (6)Albuquerque Journal, Jan 19, 1933 (7)Olean Times-Herald, Feb 20, 1940

Erno Verebes

There's something satisfyingly poignant about bit-part actors who specialise in waiter roles. It seems particularly fitting that these actors, who are the pond life of the film world, far below the big fish with whom they briefly share the screen, should play characters who exist only to help dynamic heroes and heroines follow their exciting romantic and dramatic trajectories by serving them a cocktail or two in an unassuming manner. It's easier to sympathise with them than with, say, a guy who always plays cops or gangsters and at least got to play at being someone with authority and power.

This still shows Robert Mitchum, Vincent Price and Jane Russell, the three big fish in the decidedly fishy His Kind of Woman (1951). (Actually, it's more than fishy; it's completely insane, due largely to producer Howard Hughes's capricious rewriting and recasting decisions.) The minnow in the background is Erno Verebes, efficiently delivering a scotch and soda as he nears the end of a career that had seen him deliver an awful lot of scotch and sodas to an awful lot of leading men.

But that was only in recent years; it hadn't always been that way. Once, when he was known as Ernst rather than Erno, he'd been a dashing movie idol of Weimar Germany, who cut quite the dash in his suave top hat and furs:

 

He loved!

 

He laughed! Ha ha!

He Beat women with his cane!

 

He stole hearts with his ukulele!

 (1)

Although Erno was born in New York, he grew up in Hungary, and that's where he first appeared in films. He soon moved to Berlin, where he became one of Germany's most popular screen actors. He was so famous that news of his romantic attachments with beautiful women featured occasionally in American papers. The romances of this period didn't last, however, and his final appearance in the gossip pages, in 1935, recounts his being dumped by two of the most beautiful women in Germany, under the title, "two-way loser":

(2)

Being dumped by beautiful Germans became the least of Erno's problems with the rise to power of a bunch of rather ugly Germans, who decided they'd like to dump him too, as well as all the other Jews. Wisely deciding on the same course of action as the rest of the Weimar-era film industry (apart from that unfortunate wrong-horse backer, Leni Riefenstahl), Erno fled Germany. However, while people such as Peter Lorre, Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder made the transition to Hollywood without much of a break in their careers, Erno's career stopped dead for two years.

Where was he? It's tempting to picture him stranded in somewhere like Casablanca with the other glamorous refugees in Rick's cafe, or stuck in a filthy Mexican border town, gazing longingly across the few yards of sand that separate him from the USA, like Charles Boyer in Hold Back the Dawn (1941). However, as he'd been born in New York, presumably he'd have a relatively easy time getting into America, so who knows what happened? Whatever the case may be, he eventually ended up in Hollywood, where he got a bit of decent work until the end of the war appearing in propaganda films with titles like The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler (1942) and The Hitler Gang (1944). Once the war was over, however, all that work dried up, and, for the rest of his career, his appearances were only fleeting and appear to have most often involved a tray of drinks, as in this still from The Big Clock (1948):

 

Not much of an end to a once-glittering career, but far better than Auschwitz, I suppose.

Erno retired in 1953, at the age of 50, and died in 1971, in California.

Sources: imdb.com; (1) Vintage postcards from virtual-history.com; (2) newspaperarchive.com (The Fresno Bee Republican, March 17, 1935)

Kernan Cripps

While arranging the stills for this post into chronological order, it occurred to me that, all things considered, Kernan Cripps had a pretty good world war two.

As an ageing bit-part player, he wasn't exactly active in the traditional, military sense, but he did what he could to keep spirits up on the home front. For instance, in 1942, as the battle of Midway raged in the Pacific, he spent about 30 seconds being accosted and strangled by beefy ex-wrestler Ward Bond in the first ever Raymond Chandler adaptation, The Falcon Takes Over:

The adaptation involved the bold -- and undeniably ill-advised -- decision to remove Philip Marlowe from a Philip Marlowe story ("Farewell, My Lovely"), but Kernan's doorman character isn't in the book, so he, at least, benefited from the screenwriters' somewhat free approach to the source material.

Then, in 1943, as the allied troops fought their way into Italy and were cut down on the beaches of the South Pacific, he delivered some luggage to Basil Rathbone in Sherlock Homes in Washington:

There's a dead body in that trunk, but Kernan didn't know that. One of the advantages of bit-part work is that you're often spared the more gruesome plot details.

The next year, in 1944, as his fellow Americans invaded France and liberated Paris, and the number of US war dead marched up to around 400,000, Kernan stood around beside a train, writing in his notebook while Barbara Stanwyck smuggled Fred MacMurray onboard in Double Indemnity:

Like I said: all in all, a pretty good war.

I assume Kernan's favourite role from this period was his brief appearance in Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942), in which he played an innocent movie-goer, just minding his own business and watching a silly comedy drama while, unknown to him and the rest of the audience, an evil Nazi spy runs around the theater, pursued by the feds. Kernan's on screen for about a second, just long enough for a cop to enter the shot, fire his gun at the spy and run off. It might not be Hitchcock's most memorable scene, but it's quite beautiful.

First, as the cop runs up behind him and aims at the fleeing spy, Kernan's having a great time watching the film, in which an enraged husband has pulled a gun on his wife's lover and threatened to shoot him. It's hilarious!

Then, POW, two guns go off -- one on screen, in the movie, and one right behind Kernan's ear!

The next instant, he's caught between his previously happy state and a tremendous feeling of shock -- it's as if the movie suddenly came to life!

A split second later, the cop's run off and Kernan's left staring with annoyance at nothing but a puff of smoke:

The reason I assume it would have been his favourite bit-part is that I reckon it would have reminded him of something that happened to him decades before, back when he was a handsome leading man on the stage, as he appears in this clipping from 1910:

(1)

I know it says Kerman Cripps, but newspaper guys never get anything right. He used to travel around the country, appearing in spectacular Wild West plays with thrilling pyrotechnics and real horses right up there on the stage. In 1907, the company took their latest show, "The Gambler of the West", to the Central Theater in San Francisco. Kernan was the star of the production, which was described as "a wonder of scenic novelty" in which "no expense has been spared to make the play scenically one of the finest ever presented." As the gambler, he helped a young girl "through many thrilling and narrow escapes from the villains, including attempted burning at the stake and throwing bowie knives at her while bound to a tree [and] a great prairie fire scene accomplished by electrical effects".(2)

One of the escapes involved Kernan surprising a gang of murderous red Indians by riding a horse into the middle of the camp where they had tied up the young girl. All did not go according to plan, however. Here's what the San Francisco Chronicle reported the next day:

"The animal had just swept into view of an Indian campfire, Gordon [played by Kernan] was about to draw his howitzer and disperse the howling mob. The chief had pursed his lips to hiss, 'Curse you, Jack Gordon.' But, as steady Jack dashes up to the camp, his steed refuses to rein. The maiden tied to a stake takes hope. Rescue is at hand. Or is it? On dashes the hero -- and over the footlights he goes."

Kernan's horse cleared the orchestra pit and landed in the central aisle, causing great panic and confusion among the cast and audience. According to the Chronicle, "Considering the extent of his jump, he sat his horse well." With Kernan struggling to regain control of the situation, the horse charged towards the exit doors while the Indians jumped from the stage and gave chase, trying to prevent the audience from being trampled beneath its hooves. The Chronicle continued:

"Even the villain could not have been as evil as painted, for he, too, helped subdue the steed. With the assistance of a score of supers, the contrary beast was boosted back onstage and the Gambler of the West lived out his thrilling career."(3)

Look again at this face, and ask yourself whether this isn't exactly the same wide-eyed expression of shock and wonder that Kernan would have seen frozen on the faces of the audience as he sailed over the orchestra astride 1,000lbs of out-of-control horse flesh:

Kernan died in 1953, at the age of 67.

Sources: imdb.com; newspaperarchive.com ((1)Reno Evening Gazette, 13 Aug 1910; (2)Trenton Evening Times, Sep 26, 1907; (3)San Francisco Chronicle, Jan 7, 1907)

Edgar Dearing

Here's a scene from Shadow of the Thin Man (1941) that demonstrates the Edgar Dearing four-step plan for paying the rent.

Step 1 - Ride motorcycle:

Step 2 - Perform an authentically coplike manoeuvre:

Step 3 - Deliver a couple of lines in a humorous, cartoonish manner:

Step 4 - Repeat in as many films as possible in your 40-year career, including Sullivan's Travels (1941):

And The Awful Truth (1937):

Edgar's masterful motorcycle-cop impersonation was due to his being, in fact, a real-life, full-time motorcycle cop.

Edgar started off as a stage actor, but his career was quickly derailed by the first world war. Although he was sent to Europe as part of the depressingly nicknamed "suicide squadron", he ended up getting attached to General Pershing's headquarters, where he served as a motorcycle messenger(1).

The hand of destiny! When Edgar first sat on the army-issue bike, did he recognise the event for the life-altering incident that it was? As he sat on the unfamiliar saddle and slid a gloved hand around the throttle, did he reflect that he was about to embark on a course that would eventually separate him from the great bulk of his fellow thespians and transform him into the man who would one day be known by casting directors throughout Hollywood as "that motorbike cop guy"? We can only hope so.

After the war, having presumably fallen in love with the motorbike, Edgar got a job as a motorcycle cop with the LAPD. He hadn't quite given up on acting, though, and, after a few years, he started moonlighting at the Hal Roach studios -- Laurel and Hardy were forever getting into automobile-related scrapes and there was always work for a motorcycle cop extra who could supply his own uniform and bike. Sometime in the 1930s, he quit the police and became a full-time extra(2).

And he wasn't able to act only when on a bike! His four-step plan was freely adaptable to a range of situations, such as this one, in Made for Each Other (1939):

He might be on horseback, but he still performs an authentically coplike manoeuvre before delivering a couple of lines in a humorous, cartoonish manner:

The four-step plan served Edgar well but, occasionally, a script called for him to dismount and join the ranks of common-or-garden earthbound cop extras. Here he is in After the Thin Man (1936), stopping James Stewart from entering a house:

 

I bet he tried to persuade the director that the scene would play much better if it had a motorbike in it. That cop would have no trouble keeping that guy outside if he could just accelerate down the hallway straight at him. Such a waste of top motorcycling skills.

And some directors even wasted his top cop-impersonating skills. In Big City (1937), for example, he plays a taxi driver who appears in one scene, looking on with queasy distaste as another taxi driver is forced by the cops to drink a bottle of milk (don't ask):

Thankfully, such aberrations were rare. Mostly, Edgar was able to remain in the saddle and in uniform. In 1946, a tiny news snippet appeared on the entertainment page of various newspapers:

(3)

Not bad at all. However, he was in his mid-50s by that time, and probably knew he couldn't keep riding the motorbike forever. Sure enough, the end of the 1940s brought the motorbike phase of his career to a close. As if unable to face a world in which he was too old to convincingly portray a motorcycle cop, and could only watch as younger, fitter men took the parts that he had been born to play, he retreated into the past, spending the 1950s in the motor-free world of the western, usually playing a sheriff.

He retired in 1961, and died in 1974, at the age of 81, which means that he was spared this:

Sources -- imdb.com; newspaperarchive.com ((1)Winnipeg Free Press, September 21, 1941); (3)Sunday American-Statesman, Austin, Texas, June 2, 1946)) (2)Hal Erickson's Movie Guide

Eadie Adams

In the second film in the Thin Man series, After the Thin Man (1937), Nick and Nora Charles, those loveable, crime-solving, high-functioning alcoholics, return to San Francisco from a long trip to find a wild party being thrown in their house. It’s a welcome home party for them, but it’s grown so large in their absence that none of the guests recognise them when they come in. Nick and Nora take it in their stride -- that sort of thing happens to them all the time, and, frankly, is nothing that a bucket of martinis can’t fix.

In one corner of the room, there’s an entire jazz band:

They’re playing “Sing, Sing, Sing”, and they’re pretty good. The singer is excellent. In fact, she’s having such a great time, performing there in some strangers’ living room, that she earns herself a brief close-up:

“Sing, sing, sing, sing! Everybody’s got to sing! Wa-ho! Nyah-ha! Now you’re singing with a swing!”

She’s Eadie Adams, and she sung her heart out in nightclubs around Los Angeles for most of the 1930s while trying to get into movies and was rewarded with two years of bit parts, usually cast as nightclub singers.

Her career in movies can be followed in the old columns of Louella O Parsons, who was Hollywood’s gossip supremo from the 1930s to the 1960s. Louella wielded a lot of influence in the industry, and agents worked hard to get the names of their talent into her column, even if it was just in the strange filler paragraph headed “Chatter from Hollywood” or “Snapshots of Hollywood collected at random”, which was made up of peculiarly pointless tittle tattle, delivered in short, unconnected sentences, like “Charles Chaplin patronising The Queen, the new English bar, with friends” and “Edmund Lowe entertaining with a small breakfast party”. Even back then, did anyone care?

I suppose most of the “snapshots” were included by Louella as payment towards future scoops or as favours to publicists, because a lot of them seem to be about people no one ever heard of outside her column. Like Eadie Adams.

The first time Eadie appeared in the column, however, she got a paragraph to herself. It was 1935, and Louella was announcing the start of Eadie’s contract with MGM, after she had been discovered by Ida Koverman, who was Louis B Mayer’s secretary and one of the most powerful women in Hollywood. Eadie seems to have been something of a pet project for Koverman and I assume it was Koverman’s influence that accounts for the surprising frequency with which Eadie cropped up in Louella’s column -- it certainly wasn’t her newsworthiness. Anyway, here’s the big announcement:

“For the better part of two years Eadie Adams has been singing to the film colony’s stars and producers in Hollywood's swank night spots. They liked Eadie’s singing but never thought of her as a picture possibility -- until Eadie left town for a five weeks tour, then it dawned upon producers that a pretty face, attractive figure and intriguing voice might be worth keeping here. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer finally convinced Eadie to return and sign a long-term contract.”(1)

Her first job for MGM seems to have been as an extra in Restless Knights (1937), a Three Stooges short. It’s nearly impossible to spot her, but, after close scrutiny of all the extras in the key scenes, I think I’ve done it. I reckon she’s visible in only one shot:

She’s the one on the left, walking away from the camera. I’m pretty confident. I’m almost certain. I know it might seem unlikely, but you may as well take my word for it. In any case, whichever one of those gown-draped figures is Eadie, it was hardly a promising start to a movie career, and certainly wasn’t enough to enable her to give up the day job (in her case, of course, her day job was a night job). Sure enough, the month after Louella first mentioned Eadie, she wrote:

“Two jobs are no trouble when one is young, ambitious and rarin’ to reach the top. Eadie Adams, blonde, twenty-two and talented, will divide her time the next few months between the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios and the new cinema grill at the Roosevelt hotel. Eadie is under contract to MGM who have granted her permission to sing each night at the new Roosevelt roof”.(2)

Twenty-two? More like 28, actually, but who can blame her? You know what Hollywood’s like.

And that’s how it went for the next two years, with Eadie working as an extra during the day, singing at night and taking acting classes in between.(3) Every time she got a bit part, Louella noted dutifully, if optimistically, that the role was Eadie’s “first real chance”(4) or “the break of her career”(5). But the breaks lead only to more nightclub-singer roles.

Eadie must have been pleased in June 1937, therefore, when Louella could finally print a sentence about a role that didn’t involve singing. Forgetting all the other times she had announced Eadie’s first big break, Louella wrote:

“Eadie Adams gets her first big break … with an important role in Big City, with Spencer Tracy and Luise Rainer”(6)

And here she is:

Not a nightclub or a jazz band in sight! Not one song in the entire film! Finally, a chance to prove her acting ability, even if she has no dialogue and hardly any screen time and has to play the wife of a minor character in an under-cooked, low-budget B-picture that is destined to be poorly reviewed and pretty much forgotten forever!

How’d it go? Well, after her few scenes in this movie, she never acted again, so you can decide for yourself.

She turned 30 that year (although her publicity material probably said different), and, presumably, took a long, hard look at her options. What to do? She could spend the next 30 years in increasingly less glamorous bit parts until, eventually, she’d be stuck playing ancient spinsters who run seedy boarding houses (each role, no doubt, still being hailed by Louella Parsons as her big break) or, alternatively, she could sing. She was good at singing; everyone thought so! Acting? Well, that’s another story, obviously.

She had to face the facts: she was a singer, not an actress. So, she sang. And when she’d finished singing, in the early 1960s, she went to Palm Springs and opened the Eadie Adams Realty Company, using her excellent connections to help her sell high-end residential real estate to “the stars of the entertainment world”(7). And then, in 1969, she and her partner, Pat McGrath, opened a hotel, which is still around today:

It’s called the Queen of Hearts these days, but, back then, it was the Desert Knight, and it was Palm Springs’ first hotel for lesbians. Apparently, Avenida Olancha, where it was situated, is “a quiet culdesac that is home to several permanent lesbian residents”, and is known as “lesbian lane”.(8)

I’m guessing Eadie’s partner’s first name wasn’t short for Patrick.

Eadie died in Palm Springs in 1983, at the age of 75.

Sources -- imdb.com; newspaperarchive.com ((1)The Charleston Gazette, Aug 23, 1935, (2)The Charleston Gazette, September 11, 1935, (3)The Charleston Gazette, March 6, 1936, (4)Charleston Gazette, March 6, 1936, (5)The Fresno Bee, October 2, 1937, (6)Waterloo Daily Courier, June 25, 1937); (7)palmspringscommercial.com; (8)qtmagazine.com, "Palm Springs for Women", May 27 2005

Henri Desoto

Who are all these people?

From left to right, we have:

Cyril Ring, in This Gun For Hire (scion of a distinguished acting family, played hundreds of bit-parts, including many waiters);

Glen Cavender, in Dark Victory (hero of the Spanish-American war, often played waiters);

George Humbert, in Bringing Up Baby (played dozens of waiters);

Irving Bacon, in His Girl Friday (appeared in over 500 films, frequently as a waiter);

and George Sorel, in The Blue Dahlia (dabbled in waiter roles before finding true calling as a bit-part Nazi).

Frauds! Flimflammers! Mincing mountebanks!

These people are supposed to be waiters? They think that, just because they can carry a menu elegantly or place a cocktail on a table without spilling it that they can play a waiter? Just because they perhaps have an exotic, old world accent and can pull out a chair for a lady, this qualifies them to represent the American waiting profession to the world? That might be good enough for you and the rest of the movie-going herd who could never hope to set foot in a genuinely sophisticated establishment, but it was not good enough for the discerning eye of Henri Desoto. He knew more about high-class waiting than those phoneys would ever learn. How? Because, when they were merely impersonating waiters in hundreds of movies during the 30s and 40s, he was waiting on the stars of those movies in places like this:

(1)

It's the Victor Hugo, the first exclusive restaurant to open in Beverly Hills(2), and Henri was its maître d'. Indeed, this photograph, taken at Basil Rathbone's 11th anniversary party in 1937 (at which, it seems, the female guests had been asked to wear their wedding dresses), just might show Henri at work. If I'm right (I admit that it would be quite a coincidence if I were), he's the senior-looking waiter in the centre of the picture.

Henri knew all the stars, all the directors, all the studio bosses. He counted them among his best friends. The stories he could tell! Stories like this one: Whenever Joan Crawford would stroll in for what a journalist who interviewed Henri in 1939 imagined would be "an evening of tasteful dining and rhythmic dancing", Henri would suavely ask, "The usual dinner this evening, Miss Crawford?" Usually, she would reply, "Yes." Presently, she would be served a thick, broiled New York cut sirloin steak, very rare. "That is her preference, and that's what she gets."

Such stories! He had a million of 'em. Listen: George Raft liked his steak burned to a crisp, with no seasoning. Jackie Cooper always ordered a double filet mignon with fried potatoes and at least three kinds of vegetables. Al Jolson liked to have a rack of lamb, but, instead of potatoes, which he never ate, he'd order a double portion of broccoli. Louis B Mayer, despite his great wealth, wanted nothing but broiled chicken, very dry, with no butter and very little seasoning. Hedy Lamarr, by contrast, "goes ultra-swank occasionally with orders of pheasant and quail."(3)

Obviously, working so closely with the greatest movie stars of the age provided Henri with many such profound insights into the acting profession. Little wonder, then, that he began to develop some ambition towards appearing in the movies himself. Why not? You think being a headwaiter in a place like the Victor Hugo isn't an acting job of the most supreme level? You think it doesn't take skill to present oneself to every guest, from the aristocrats of Hollywood to the vulgar mogul who grew up in a lower-east side slum and has manners straight from the shtetl, as the most agreeable, amenable and efficient servant? Of course he could act. And what's more, he could play a better waiter than those charlatans he saw onscreen practically every time he went to the movies. What did they know of waiting? Nothing! Who knew of waiting? Henri Desoto!

Not long after America entered the war, the draft robbed Hollywood of many of its able-bodied young actors, which opened up many roles to men who would previously have been overlooked or considered only for supporting parts. That's a large part of the reason why someone with a face like Humphrey Bogart's was able to become a romantic lead, for example(4). The horrible global fight against genocidal fascism also had a bright side for Henri, and, in 1942, he was able to begin moonlighting as a waiter in the movies. Many of his roles were without dialogue, like this one from Scarlet Street (1946):

But, before long, the world finally heard the voice of Desoto. The same year as Scarlet Street came out, Henri appeared in Somewhere in the Night:

In this scene, John Hodiak walks into Henri's restaurant and asks whether Mr Cravat (a mysterious, Keyser Söze-like figure) has reserved a table. Henri consults his booking list and says, just as suavely as if he were addressing Joan Crawford herself, "I'm sorry, Mr Cravat doesn't have a reservation tonight." When Hodiak says that Mr Cravat must have forgotten and that he'll wait for him at the bar, Henri nods, as if to say that that is the wisest thing a guest of the restaurant has ever said, even though, of course, if Mr Cravat has forgotten about dinner, there's little chance he'll show up at the bar. That nod of the head, calculated to smooth over the awkward situation and remove the possibility that the customer might feel the slightest bit embarrassed at having quite obviously been snubbed by a potential dinner companion -- that's a move that Henri surely cultivated over years of genuine experience of accommodating the fragile egos of Hollywood stars in places like the Victor Hugo. Such a nod you do not get if you hire some jobbing bit-part actor.

Henri was the real thing.

Strange, then, that he doesn't appear to have had any more work in films after 1946. It can't just have been because of the flood of newly demobilised bit-part actors returning to resume their faux waiting careers. Surely Henri had proved himself far superior to those play-acting impostors.

I assume it has something to do with this story, which was in newspapers across America in June 1947:

(5)

Oh dear. Charged with tax evasion by a federal grand jury after failing to declare the $150-a-day tips he got at his new job in the racetrack restaurants. According to the prosecution, he paid the Government only $485, when he should have paid it ten times that, based on a yearly income of $13,469. How big a deal was the charge? Pretty big. In today's money, the undeclared tips would be worth $1,387 a day, amounting to a secret yearly income from tips alone of $50,000. A major scandal for a man in Henri's position.

He was found guilty and fined $2,500(6) ($23,000 these days), and so ended a promising film career.

I don't know whether his retirement from cinema had anything to do with his crime, and the newspaper record is silent on the question of whether he continued working as a top-class maître d'. All I can tell you is that he spent the last years of his life in Miami(7), where he died in 1963.

Sources -- imdb.com; (1)basilrathbone.net, image copyright unknown; (2)Wannamaker, Marc, "Beverly Hills: 1930-2005" Arcadia Press, p97; (3) Lowell Sun, 30 October 1939; (4) "Biesen, Sheri Chinen, "Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir", JHU Press 2005, p13; (5) Morning Herald, Hagerstown, MD, June 6 1947; (6)Long Beach Independent, 4 Sept 1947; (7) Winnipeg Free Press, 9 Sept 1963 (newspapers via newspaperarchive.com). Scarlet Street still, public domain; Somewhere in the Night still (c) 20th Century Fox.

WAITER STILLS: Cyril Ring from This Gun for Hire (c) Paramount; Glen Cavender from Dark Victory (c) Warner Bros; George Humbert from Bringing up Baby (c) Warner Bros; Irving Bacon from His Girl Friday, public domain; George Sorel from The Blue Dahlia (c) Paramount.

Franklin Parker - Extra! Extra!

(1)

As I wrote in the previous post, Franklin Parker was a keen college actor from Lincoln, Nebraska, who went to Hollywood in the 1920s with great hopes and a sackful of dreams but ended up in countless bit-parts, more often than not as a newspaper reporter.

This front-page news story from 1938 almost certainly represents the peak of his fame.

The movie star of the headline isn't him, of course. It's Lyle Talbot, a B-movie actor who you probably haven't heard of. He's assured pop-cultural immortality, however, as not only was he in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) but, remarkably, he was also the first person to play both Batman's Commissioner Gordon and Superman's Lex Luthor.

Franklin and Lyle, both Nebraska boys, met when Lyle was the leading man in the stock theatre company in Lincoln. Their friendship survived the transition to Hollywood and the fact that Lyle got plenty of good work while Franklin made do with walk-ons.

But what about this fire?

Here's what the newspaper said:

"BEVERLY HILLS, Calif -- Trapped by fire on the second floor of his pretentious home here early today, Lyle Talbot, handsome leading man of the films, and his house guest, Franklin Parker, also an actor, leaped to safety early today.

They were taken to the Beverly Hills receiving hospital suffering painful burns. Their conditions were described to be serious."

Did "pretentious" have a different meaning in 1938? If not, that would seem to be a needlessly harsh thing to say about the house of a guy who's lying in hospital with serious burns. There's a time and a place, surely.

The article continued:

"Talbot's hair was burned from his scalp and Parker's back was severely burned. The house was nearly demolished by the flames after the pair made their 20-foot leap ... Police theorized the fire may have been started by a burning cigarette, left in the living room. Talbot had entertained last night, authorities said they had learned, but all of the guests except Parker had left the home when the fire broke out."

The following day's papers carried another AP wire story about Parker and Talbot, to which the Galveston Daily News gave the headline: "Burns Inflicted Rescuing Friend From Fire May End Talbot's Screen Career". The story read:

"The red badge of courage belonged to Screen Actor Lyle Talbot, hero of a fire that destroyed his $50,000 home, but the penalty of his heroism probably is a blighted screen career.

Talbot's hands, neck, arms and head were burned so severely he may never appear again before the cameras. He saved the life of his house guest, Franklin D Parker, also an actor, by dragging him from a fiery, smoke-filled bedroom to a second-storey ledge and safety.

Witnesses saw Talbot, trapped on the second floor by flames that started at ground level, trying desperately to drag Parker's unconscious form out on a porch roof from a bedroom. Talbot, choking with smoke, his pajamas aflame, finally got Parker to safety and then leaped 20 feet to the ground to assist firemen who had been summoned by neighbors.

The condition of both men was critical, said physicians at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital."(2)

The story went on to say that Talbot's wife was staying with a friend whose husband was out of town (so perhaps the party at Talbot's house had been some sort of gals-free, stags-only sort of affair) and then recounted Talbot's career to date, noting that his last role was in "I Stand Accused" (1938), in which he played a gangster "and met the usual screen death at the hands of the law."

Of Franklin, it said only, "Parker played on the New York stage several years ago. He has had several bit roles and a few featured parts since coming to Hollywood."

Franklin Parker: even when he makes the front page, it's in a bit-part.

It seems that the pair's burns were less serious than they appeared to be, because they both continued to work as steadily as they had ever done, and photographs of Lyle Talbot in later years show him with a full head of hair and no visible scars:

(3)

Franklin died of a heart attack in 1962, at the age of 60, and Lyle lived until he was 92, in 1996, when he died of "natural causes".

Sources-- (1)Centralia Daily Chronicle October 25, 1938; (2)Galveston Daily News , October 26, (3)From reflectionsofyesterday.com

Franklin Parker

Hold the front page! George Bailey's a crook! All these years we've figured him for a swell guy, but now we learn the truth! He's an embezzler and a cheat! There's $8,000 missing from his building and loan company and we all know where it's gone -- didn't everyone see him giving money to that hussy, Violet Bick? Hot dog (as George would say), what a story!

This morning's Bedford Falls Sentinel looked like this:

Tomorrow's front page is also going to be about one of the Bailey boys, but the story won't be so pretty. Old man Potter's sworn out a warrant for Bailey's arrest and the newspaper's sent a reporter to get exclusive on-the-scene coverage of the apprehension of gigolo George, the building-and-loan bandit!

Here's the reporter, on the left, waiting in the Baileys' house with the bank examiner and the sheriff:

He feels pretty bad. His editor might think that this is a great story, but he doesn't. He should be talking to the other two, trying to get the low-down on Bailey's secret life of crime, but, darn it, he just can't bring himself to do it. No one seems very talkative anyway.

Sometimes, being a reporter means being the biggest heel in town, and this is one of those times. He knows he's got no business being here. So what if George Bailey skimmed a little bit off the top here and there? Can't we give the poor guy a break, at least for a day or two, instead of hounding him like a gang of savages? It's Christmas, for crying out loud! Bailey knows he's trapped. The last time anyone saw him, he was staggering off into a heavy blizzard after drunkenly crashing his car into a tree. Before that, apparently, he got liquored up in a bar on the edge of town, where he got into a fight. Poor sap.

There's been some talk about Bailey's shameful, dark depressions before. Might he kill himself? Sure, it's a possibility. Who knows what a guy'll do when he's in a corner? The road he was last seen on leads out to the bridge over the black, icy river. Bailey wouldn't be the first to take that lonely route out of Bedford Falls. No doubt the Sentinel will get a call on Christmas morning from some guy a few miles downriver who's just hauled a frozen body out of the water. And guess who'll be sent to cover the story...

But what's this? Suddenly, George Bailey burst in the door!

Our reporter rises to his feet, amazed at this apparition. George is jubilantly whooping and hollering like a madman and running up and down the stairs, hugging his wife and children and crying for joy. This is utterly bizarre, thinks the Sentinel's man on the spot. Perhaps, he reasons, the best thing to do is to stand here dumbly like a stupefied ox and do absolutely nothing at all.

He decides to maintain this usefully blank demeanour as, inexplicably, dozens of people suddenly show up and start spontaneously giving Bailey money. Then, as more and more townsfolk rush in to throw money at George, our reporter -- feeling either like he's dreaming or like he's just woken from a bad dream -- forgets his code of journalistic impartiality, takes off his hat, and makes his way through the crowd to add a wad of dollar bills to the already huge pile on the Baileys' table. He has no way of knowing what's going on, or why he should be joining in; it just feels like the right thing to do.

Here he is, smiling as he squeezes into the space behind the sheriff, who has just (illegally?) torn up the arrest warrant and started to bellow, "Hark, the Herald Angels":

Life sure is wonderful, isn't it?

I could be wrong, but I suspect that this small role in It's a Wonderful Life (1946) is the high point in Franklin Parker's career, whether he knew it or not. Of course, he might have disagreed, but I'm certain that, given that he'd played bit-part reporters in 30 films in the years leading up to his brief appearance in this film, his performance must surely be one of the most finely honed portrayals of an insignificant background journalist character that you're ever likely to see.

More than two decades earlier, Franklin had arrived in Hollywood from Lincoln, Nebraska, determined to parlay his years of experience in student drama into a career as a great movie star. He would act in films written by his old Lincoln buddy, Joe Marsh, and directed by his other Nebraska pal, Box Cox, who had both come to Hollywood with him. Tagging along was another Lincoln High alumnus, Bill Moran, who wasn't exactly sure what he wanted to do but knew that he'd better be around when his ambitious young friends hit the big time. (1)

Of course, the big time is pretty hard to hit, even for a bunch of boy wonders whose high school and college dramatic productions had received rave reviews in all the local papers, and, after failing to get any film work whatsoever, the friends quit Hollywood. The other three had had enough, and headed for home, defeated, but Franklin didn't give up. Okay, so he wasn't ready for the movies, but there were other places a guy could act. He set out for Phoenix, Arizona, where, he'd been told, a stock theatre company needed a juvenile, and spent the rest of his 20s on the stock theatre circuit, honing his craft, extending his range and trying to perfect a subtle, nuanced style of acting that, he was sure, would be in demand once the talkies took over from silent film. (2)

In 1931, he returned to Hollywood -- this time bringing with him a now impressive résumé that included appearances with major Broadway stars such as Lenore Ulric and Marjorie Rambeau (3) -- and again offered himself to the casting directors, who finally realised how foolish they had been to overlook this young man before. They took a long look at his face in this new light and decided that it would be perfect placed somewhere in the background of a shot, preferably under a generic reporters' fedora. Whatever had happened to him since he'd left Hollywood in the 20s, it had evidently made him uncannily well equipped to play bit-part newspapermen, and he ended up pretty much stuck in that role -- he might escape it for a while and go wild with the novelty of playing a press photographer or a newsreel cameraman, but, sooner or later, he'd find himself tucking the press card back in his hatband again.

Franklin had a good voice, though, which led to a lot of fairly easy work(4). Here's a scene in The Blue Dahlia (1946), that's typical of the use to which this facet of his talents was put:

He's not actually in the still -- he played the police stenographer on the other end of the phone: one line; zero screen time.

He might not have had the sort of career he'd hoped for when he and the guys caught the Greyhound bus out of Lincoln all those years ago, but at least he wasn't a quitter like Joe, Box and Bill, which meant that, when he made a victorious return visit to his hometown after a couple of years' steady bit-part work, the local paper could print this headline:

(5)

and puff him up by writing excited things like, "The Brown Derby, the Cocoanut Grove, and Sunset Boulevard aren't just words to Franklin Parker, for he dines and dances and promenades there with the others of the movie lights"!

Franklin retired in 1953, at the age of 50, after his first and only appearance on television, when he had a small role in an episode of Mr & Mrs North as, of course, a reporter.

Sources: www.imdb.com; (1,2 and 3)Lincoln Sunday Journal and Star, June 4, 1933; (4 and 5)Lincoln Sunday Journal and Star, December 31, 1933 (via www.newspaperarchive.com); stills from 'It's a Wonderful Life' and 'The Blue Dahlia'(c)Paramount Pictures.

Clarence Muse

Although he appeared in more than 150 films, Clarence Muse played a character with a second name only six times. Something similar is true of hundreds of bit-part actors, of course, but the meagre second-name count seems particularly unfair in this case, given Clarence's obvious accomplishments. He had a degree in international law from the oldest law school in Pennsylvania. He was a pioneer of the black theatre movement in the 1920s and founded Harlem's Lafayette Theater.(1) As a performer, he was daring enough to become "the first Negro on the American stage to make up like a white man".(2) He was also a musician, a composer and an opera singer. "Great!" said Hollywood, "We need a man with just your talents to stand around in the background of our movies, dressed as a Pullman porter!"

Clarence didn't seem too upset about it, though:

In Alice in Movieland, a short film from 1940, Joan Leslie, then an ingénue on the threshold of stardom, plays, fittingly enough, an ingénue on the threshold of stardom. Clarence plays the guy who carries her bags off the train. The still above shows Clarence in an uncharacteristically unprofessional moment, a single frame in which he catches the camera's eye and grins. For the rest of his time on screen, he performs flawlessly; an exemplary embodiment of the qualities of self-effacing subservience and obedience that the Pullman train company required in its employees.

For decades, the Pullman company was the largest single employer of black people in the world.(3) George Pullman, who founded the company after the American civil war, established a policy of employing only black men (ex-slaves, initially) to work as porters, judging that, "for passengers to feel truly comfortable on his sleepers, they had to see the porter as someone ... you could look at but not notice, as if he did not exist. An invisible man."(4) Pullman's policy was enormously successful, and thousands of ex-slaves, then thousands more of their children and their children's children became Pullman porters. Except for the ones in Hollywood, who became actors who played Pullman porters. There are hardly any black actors who were active in the 30s, 40s and 50s who don't have a porter or two somewhere in their résumé. And Clarence Muse had considerably more than that.

Look who shows up in the scene in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943) when Joseph Cotten is escaping from the police on a Pullman sleeper:

Clarence has a couple of lines, informing Cotten that his stop is coming up. To the audience, Cotten's behaviour is incredibly suspicious: he's been hiding out in that curtained-off section of the car for the entire journey, and has allowed no one, not even the man who brought his bags on the train, to see his face. It doesn't make any difference to Clarence's porter, though. It's none of his business how a man wants to travel, even if he's obviously a desperate fugitive fleeing justice. White folks and their unknowable ways: best pay 'em no mind.

White folks' ways confuse him again in The Thin Man Goes Home (1944). William Powell and Myrna Loy have just got off the train when Powell remembers that he's carrying a bottle of milk that he'd promised to fill up for a nursing mother in their carriage. As the train pulls out, Powell deftly slips the bottle into the hand of the porter who is (rather oddly, on reflection) waving goodbye to the station.

The face that Clarence is pulling as he regards the bottle is the exaggerated, bug-eyed expression you see on virtually all the black servant characters in films of the time. Clarence hardly ever used it, usually managing to find some way of suggesting that his characters might have some thought going on in their heads. Donald Bogle, a writer on black cinema, credits Clarence's stage experience with enabling him to avoid the flamboyant "uncle tomism" of many of his peers. "Even the manner in which he walked -- with head lifted, body erect, eyes straight ahead -- indicated a self-respect and black self-awareness that other actors of the period lacked."(5) However, he's got little to do in this scene but play for laughs, so out comes the Stepin Fetchit mug.

When Clarence heard that he had been given a part in a Sherlock Holmes film, did he allow himself to hope, not unreasonably, that he might not be cast as a Pullman porter this time? I hope not, because the inexplicably anachronistic plotting of Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943), which involves Nazi espionage in the middle of world war 2, takes Holmes to America on the trail of these two sweethearts, who are reunited -- unfortunately for Clarence -- at a train station:

Clarence is there to help passengers disembark because, I suppose, the director felt that a train-station scene just wouldn't feel right without him standing somewhere in the background.

However, Clarence didn't always play train staff. In 1938, he played a vengeful crime boss's henchman: a wily killer in disguise. What was the disguise? Well, the film's called Prison Train...

Those two obvious mafia types are his associate henchmen, who are also undercover (a C-minus for effort, though). The previous century's eccentric staffing policy meant that their undercover disguise doesn't entail any dinner serving or bag carrying, for which they must have been thankful. Hooray for George Pullman!

Apart from having to play porters all the time, Clarence probably had a great time in the 30s and 40s. Most mainstream Hollywood studios didn't want him for anything better than minor character parts, but Frank Capra, among others, gave him some good work, including a supporting lead role in Broadway Bill (1934). In 1940, he became the first black director of a Broadway show (Run, Little Chillun). More importantly, that year also saw the release of an independently produced film designed for a black audience, which Clarence co-wrote and starred in: Broken Strings:

According to the Pittsburgh Courier, America's most widely read black newspaper, "The motion picture 'Broken Strings' is an artistic triumph! Here is a Negro movie that tops anything and everything that has been done".

Of Clarence, the review, written for an audience who might well have seen him in black theatre productions back in the 1920s, said: "Mr Muse's portrayal of a concert violinist who thought that swing music desecrated the very word 'music' is indeed masterful ... Clarence Muse can well be proud of his role in this picture ... He was the Clarence Muse of old, playing as he did years ago when he paced across the stage ... [He played] a role where he could run the gamut of emotion ... his greatest screen characterization yet."

The newspaper loved the film. Unlike the usual black cinema offerings, it had neither gunplay nor negro spiritual numbers. What it had was emotional power -- enough that "probably for the first time, women will shed a tear viewing an all-colored cast film." There was something else, as well: "The picture is also extraordinary because you see Negroes conducting successful businesses ... You will see Negro bank tellers [and] neat and trim Negro nurses. Jess Lee Brooks plays a surgeon".(6)

Of course, there is not one Pullman porter.

Clarence kept on acting, but didn't write another film. He played over a dozen more porters during the rest of the 40s, before going into semi-retirement. He died in 1979.

Sources: www.imdb.com, (1)New York Times, October 17, 1979; (2)Brownsville Herald, November 27, 1949 (via www.newspaperarchive.com); (3)Tye, Larry, "Rising From the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class" (Owl Books, 2004) - , p28; (4)Tye, Larry, ibid, p25; (5) Bogle, Donald, "Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History" (Fourth Edition), (Continuum), p54; (6)Pittsburgh Courier, March 25, 1940, quoted in Sampson, Henry T, "Blacks in Black and White: A Source Book on Black Films" (second edition) (Scarecrow Press, 1995), p360.

Beatrice Roberts

A couple of trusty character actors go face to face in this short scene from Scarlet Street (1945). Rosalind Ivan, laden with parcels, specialised in mean, unpleasant women and was consequently awarded the nickname, "Ivan the Terrible" by mean, unpleasant journalists. Arthur Loft, playing the gallery owner, was "a fussy-looking man who appeared as if he had been weaned on a lemon", according to the only reference work I can find that can be bothered to include him,(1) and appeared in many small roles as pushy or officious old men.

However, they're far too famous to bother about, unlike the silent woman watching them from behind her desk. She's Beatrice Roberts and, by the time Scarlet Street came around, she'd spent over 10 years playing anonymous pretty girls, secretaries and, increasingly, nurses, like this one flitting by in The Killers (1946):

She didn't get into the movies until she was in her 30s, and, therefore, too old for her first career, which involved standing around looking beautiful. Here she is 20 years before Scarlet Street, when she was Miss Greater New York:

That's not an evening gown. I don't know what she's wearing, but whatever it is, I'm pretty sure it shows a lot of leg for 1925. The newspaper tells us that she's been named "the most beautiful girl in America in an evening gown"(2) for the second year running and justifies using such a prurient photograph by pretending that the picture is needed to illustrate the crazy fact that a gal with a set of gams like that is also in possession of a university diploma in business. The story doesn't mention that she was also in possession of a husband who drew cartoons for the New York Globe. He was Robert Ripley, and, in a few years, his "Believe it or Not!" series would become a worldwide success, making him the first millionaire cartoonist and enabling him to spend the rest of his life travelling the world taking pictures of mermaid skeletons, two-headed cows and men with horns growing out of the back of their heads.

Beatrice wasn't married to him by that point, though. They divorced just after her beauty pageant successes, and, after a brief spell in vaudeville, she married a Los Angeles attorney called William Van Rensselaer Smith and moved out west.

Her new husband appears to have been stinking rich. The Van Rensselaers were old, old money. In the 17th century, they owned a large chunk of what is now New York state, having made a fortune in the colonial diamond and pearl trade in the previous century. By the early 20th century, the descendants' main occupation appears to have been suing each other for shares of the masses of cash that were sloshing around. Witness this selection of headlines about the family from the New York Times:

"J.A. VAN RENSSELAER ACCUSED BY MOTHER; Arrested for Writing a Letter Demanding Money and threatening to Kill Her. ADMITS THAT HE WROTE IT" (July 21, 1908)

"VAN RENSSELAER ESTATE NOT MYTH, SAYS LAWYER -- Letter Shows the Lumberman Refused $500,000 to Renounce His Claim" (Nov 12, 1904)

"RICH SPINSTER HAD GAS LIGHTED AT NOON -- Relatives [contesting her will] Contend That She Was Unduly Influenced By A Relative" (Jan 4, 1912)

This marriage didn't work out for Beatrice, either. By 1933, gossip columnists were romantically linking William with an actress called Nancy Carroll. Oddly, the stories don't mention Beatrice, although she was still married to William, with whom she had a three-year-old son. They divorced in 1935, by which time Beatrice had started to appear in films as attractive set dressing: a passenger on a luxury cruise; a guest at a glamorous party; a fashion show mannequin; and so on.

Her run of background parts was broken in 1937, when, seemingly out of the blue, we find her starring in two films. Okay, so perhaps Park Avenue Logger and Love Takes Flight were B-movies, and pretty silly ones at that (their taglines, respectively, were: "A social lion turns mountain wildcat, in a Northwest lumber camp!" and "TOGETHER - they followed the Adventure Trail in a Blazing Romance of the Airways! It's an Air-Thriller!"), but a lead role is a lead role! There were adverts in the papers and everything, even if the spelling mistake in the first line of this one suggests that the studio didn't exactly see the need to put its brightest and best ad-men on the job:

So how had she managed it? Simple. Leaving aside looks, talent and the ability to wear an evening gown in a reliably beautiful manner, it turns out that all a girl needs to do, if she's really serious about her career, is to become the mistress of the head of MGM!

"Merchant of Dreams", Charles Higham's biography of Louis B Mayer, which mentions Beatrice just twice, explains what happened:

"Mayer had noticed her when she appeared as a guest in a party scene in San Francisco [1936]; soon afterward, he began dating her. He fell in love with her; for years, she was the love of his life. She shared with him a passion for operettas and Viennese waltzes; she was an accomplished pianist, which, of course, appealed to him."

However, after those two starring roles, Beatrice quickly slid down the cast list again, via a few supporting roles, and was soon off the credits altogether. What could have gone wrong? Charles Higham attempts an explanation:

"[Mayer] would have liked to have built her as a star, but his executive staff refused to believe she had acting ability and would not agree to her being cast in anything. Not even Mayer could force a producer to take on an actress. Miss Roberts accepted the situation, and Mayer insisted on keeping her under contract, loaning her out for picture after picture ... He had an under-the-table arrangement with Universal to have her placed on semipermanent loan-out, and for years she appeared in Universal films as maids, nurses or secretaries, glimpsed for an instant; an attractive, fascinating dark presence, living out a ghostly career on the sidelines."(3)

That's astonishing. "Not even Mayer could force a producer to take on an actress." Really? Louis B Mayer, the highest-salaried executive in America, the most influential man in Hollywood, couldn't get his mistress decent roles in any of the hundreds of films that were pouring out of his studio at the time? She must have been really bad. However, a review of one of the films in which she was a supporting player carried this headline:

Didn't the reviewer know that she had absolutely no talent? He mustn't have heard. Annoyingly, the review doesn't say anything more about her performance, but we can assume that she wasn't entirely horrible on screen -- certainly not so horrible that a producer would risk offending Louis B Mayer just to keep her out of his film -- so there must be another reason for her "ghostly career on the sidelines". The simplest explanation strikes me as the likeliest: she didn't get any high-profile work because Louis B Mayer didn't want her to get any high-profile work, because the last thing he would have wanted, as the head of a studio whose reputation was founded on "family values" pictures with a strong moral tone, is a high-profile mistress.

Perhaps I'm being too uncharitable, but it wouldn't be the worst thing that anyone has justifiably claimed about Mayer. Scott Eyman's "Lion of Hollywood", another Mayer biography, claims that it was common knowledge among insiders that Mayer used the contract list for "his own private harem" and quotes the director, Max Reinhardt, on Mayer's tactics:

"Mayer often saw to it that someone he could trust went ahead of him with a girl, just so the dame could never claim he had corrupted her. It was his way of putting them in the position of whores."(4)

In 1943, when Beatrice was in her early 40s, the 60-year-old Mayer "lost interest" in her and took up with a presumably more interesting 27-year-old called Ginny Simms.(5) The nurse and secretary roles kept coming Beatrice's way until, in 1949, she left Hollywood and went home to Massachusetts.

The only role for which she appears destined to be remembered, due to the obsessive nature of science-fiction fandom, is the one she had in the 1938 Saturday morning serial, "Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars", when she was cast as Queen Azura, the supporting evildoer (under Ming the Merciless, obviously). Here she is with Buster Crabbe in her final scene(6). She may have lived as a secretary, but she died a Queen!

Sources -- imdb.com, , (1) Hal Erickson's Movie Guide; (2)The Bridgeport Telegram, September 21, 1925, via newspaperarchive.com; (3) "Merchant of Dreams", Charles Higham, p.276; (4)"Lion of Hollywood", Scott Eyman, p.316; (5) "Merchant of Dreams", Charles Higham, p.348; (6)"Look Magazine", March 29, 1938, via www.flashgordon.ws; still from Scarlet Street, public domain; still from The Killers, (c) Universal Pictures.

Faith Bacon

We're in an empty nightclub, it's late afternoon. The club is owned by a gangster called Frankie Terris, who runs the town's numbers rackets and is only a few scenes away from being sent to Alcatraz for murder. No one's around, except for a young dancer, Maxine, rehearsing for that evening's show. She strikes a series of oddly stilted poses, awkwardly turning and swaying in a manner that falls some way short of graceful.

Very few of the performances in Prison Train (1938), a cheap, hour-long supporting feature, are noticeably professional -- or even good -- but this seems particularly amateurish. Could she have been deliberately cast for her bad dancing? Perhaps we need someone to be callously fired by the gangster boss and thrown out on the street like cheap trash, only to resurface at the end of the film, pistol in hand, as a vengeful plot device -- the wronged hard luck girl who, by plugging the gangster, will resolve the film in a way forbidden to our morally upright hero. It's possible. However, this turns out to be her only scene, and she contributes nothing to the plot. We have to assume, therefore, that the poor woman was just a bad dancer but no one cared. Why did no one care?  Because she's Faith Bacon, the most beautiful woman in the world (according to Florenz Ziegfeld) and the supposed inventor of the fan dance.

When she was 20, Faith Bacon got a job in Broadway, as a chorus girl in Earl Carroll's Vanities of 1930. Carroll, a bigtime Broadway producer who, in his day, gloried in the snappy nickname, "the picker of pulchritude", was anxious to come up with a new way of getting some naked female flesh up on stage as part of the show. In New York, it was legal to have nude women on stage as long as they didn't move, so shows often featured artistic tableaux with an array of stationary nudes. However, that wasn't good enough for the pulchritude picker, who found himself in a creative crisis. There had to be a novel way of flashing some skin without getting arrested! At this moment of emergency, according to Faith's publicist -- clearly a fan of 42nd Street (1933) -- "a chorine stepped out of line and offered a suggestion." It was Faith, of course, taking a reckless chance to pitch her idea to the top man. "Mr Carroll," she said, "Why can't we do a number where I'm covered when I move, and undraped when I stop? For example -- let's say the orchestra plays a waltz. I dance around, but on every third note, the music stops and I stand still and uncover!" (1)

Carroll was impressed, and asked what she thought she could use to cover herself during the waltzing interludes. She suggested that ostrich feathers would be ideal, and so the fan dance -- truly, the zenith of American pre-war culture -- was born.

Faith toured America for the next few years, standing still on every third note, getting lots of ink in the gossip pages and occasionally getting busted by the police for outraging public decency (the busts always went down in such a way as to publicise, not shut down, her show).

So how come she dances so badly in Prison Train? Indeed, what's she even doing in this low-budget poverty row production at all? A short syndicated news story from the year before the film came out might help to explain things. It bears this unhappy headline:

In the story, Faith describes what happened during a performance at Chicago's State-Lake theater in December 1936:

"I was taking a pose in the finale. The Show was called 'Temptations' and all the girls were supposed to be temptations, you know, temptations of man. One was power, another was wine, another was pearls and so on. I was beauty.

"I was told to stand on a glass box and the last part of the number came when they parted the curtains and showed me there in the nude. I was wearing a special spray, which brings out the better points of the body, and there were lights shining on me up through the top of the glass box.

"Well, the curtains parted and I crashed through the box. All the girls started screaming for a doctor and running around the stage, but somehow I climbed out of all the broken glass and danced."

She danced for a short while, naked and covered in blood, before collapsing. I can't imagine what the audience made of it. Exactly what temptation of man might they have assumed was being portrayed?

Someone picked her up from the stage, covered her eyes and warned her not to look down. She spent a month in hospital and was left with "deep and ugly scars" on both legs. "It was two months before I could dance again," she said, "and I still can't toe dance. I even had to learn to walk." (2)

She continued to perform, but in less and less wholesome venues (not to mention Prison Train), eventually ending up in bars and carnivals in small towns. By 1948, things had got so bad that she sued a carnival boss who she claimed had tried to get her to break her contract by throwing tacks on the stage while she danced barefoot.

She doesn't appear in the press again until she's 47 years old. On September 27, 1956, papers across America ran this story:

Apparently, Faith had been out of work for some time and had gone to Chicago to look for work in skid row striptease spots. One night, after three weeks of refusals, she had an argument with her roommate about her decision to go back to live with her family in Erie, Pennsylvania. The argument ended when she ran from the room and threw herself from a third-floor window in the hallway. The next day, her roommate told reporters, "She wanted the spotlight again. She would have taken any kind of work in show business." (3)

The police inventory of her belongings listed: "Miscellaneous clothing, one white metal ring, train ticket to Erie, Pa., and 85 cents". (4)

Faith's scene in Prison Train ends when the gangster's sister comes to the club and asks where her brother is. Faith says he'll be back soon and that the sister can wait, if she likes.

This scene just happens, by complete accident, to show these two women, both roughly the same age, at the moment their careers cross over. Dorothy Comingore, sensibly dressed in a coat and hat, is only a couple of years (and a few more bit parts) away from her role as Susan, Kane's second wife, in Citizen Kane (1941). Faith, standing around in her underwear, has already had her best years; for her, this crummy movie is just a humiliating detour on the way to that third-floor window.

Sources -- www.imdb.com; www.newspaperarchive.com ((1) King Features Syndicate, 1938; (2)The Hammond Times, Feb 25 1937; (3)Aiken Standard and Review, September 27, 1956; (4)The Lowell Sun, Sep 27, 1956); Studio photograph of Faith (c) Photocave Gallery; Stills from Prison Train, public domain.)

Eddie Hall

I'm often surprised by how much information it's possible to find out about bit-part players and walk-ons, these unrenowned and long-dead unsung Joes who happened to be called on simply to pass Bogart a drink or light a cigarette for Lana Turner before leaving the scene and the audience's consciousness. But for us to be able to find out anything about them, they have to have some noteworthy characteristic that lets us identify them. For example, they have to have played nothing but butlers or cops or one-legged priests; just playing henchmen generally isn't enough. Also, it helps if they have a remarkable name, like Milton Kibbee (370 walk-on parts in 20 years -- not too shabby).

However, there's a huge group of extras who it's impossible to identify; a layer of people below even the unsung Joes. All those men in boxing match audiences, those couples in swanky nightclubs, those crowds of reporters outside courtrooms. Who, for example, is this blurry, indistinct soldier carrying a suitcase at the left of this frame from The Blue Dahlia (1946)?

It should be impossible to find out who he is; The Blue Dahlia was filmed just after the end of the war and there are demobilised soldiers walking about in the background of every outdoors scene, none of them doing anything significant. If they appear at all on the studio's cast list, they'll be credited as "soldier" or even simply "extra". However, the IMDB cast list rather peculiarly includes a specific credit for "Soldier picking up suitcase in bus station". That's him! That's exactly what he does, and no more! No other soldier in the film, let alone the bus station, has any interaction with a suitcase! So who is he? Why, he's Eddie Hall, of course! And the cast list also has a picture of him:

It appears that Eddie was human scenery in around 170 films, specialising in no particular type. Oddly, on the IMDB, almost every role is specified -- he's almost never simply "man", like so many other bit-part players. Instead, he's "Train passenger reading newspaper" in Port of 40 Thieves (1944); he's "Sailor, third row behind Casey" in The Fleet's In (1942); he's "Pipe smoker walking past Dusty" in North West Mounted Police (1940). These are, clearly, tiny roles but, we'd be able to make Eddie out quite easily if we were to happen upon one of those films. For example, here he is as "Second baggage man at train station" in Another Thin Man (1939):

That's him standing on the bed of the truck. He pulls the trunk up and balances a box on top of it before the truck drives off, carrying him out of the film -- a role that's quite typical of his appearances. Eddie plugged away at the movies for 10 years before quitting to become a car salesman. Ten more years passed before he married an ex-dancer (who also appeared in bit parts) and had a kid. He died of a heart attack in 1963, when his young boy was just five.

He scored only four minor credited appearances, three of which were in B-movies starring Tom Neal. Eddie was friends with Neal, who was, presumably, able to influence the casting. Tom Neal's most famous film is the incredibly cheaply made but highly regarded noir classic Detour (1945). An uncredited Eddie shows up briefly in it, as well:

See that blurry, indistinct mechanic walking past the car? That's him.

So, how do we know so much about Eddie Hall? Who has been so diligently detailing his every screen appearance in an effort to ensure that posterity does not forget that it is none other than Eddie Hall who can be seen drinking in a saloon behind Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in The Road to Utopia (1946)?

It turns out that it's Eddie's son, Parry Hall. According to a message that he posted on a rather obscure message board, he's spent the past 20 years trying to research his dad's career and collect any old films and ephemera that might feature him. He writes that he's been making contact with old actors who might have worked with his dad and, on another message board, he talks about going to meet an old man called Huntz Hall (no relation), who played a kid who was chased out of a theater by an usher, played by Eddie, in Little Tough Guy (1938). It transpires that Huntz really didn't know Eddie very well at all, but would wave at him if he passed him on the Universal lot.

Parry must have spent hours studying the faces in the background of obscure films that he's somehow managed to get copies of, rewinding crowd scenes again and again, freezing promising frames and asking, "Is that you, dad?"

This is a remarkably touching example of filial devotion, and I can't say how much I approve of it. Accordingly, I'll try to help out insofar as I am able.

Detour isn't the only film noir that Eddie appeared in; according to the IMDB, he was in the most important noir of all, Double Indemnity (1944), in which he played "Man in Drug Store". This isn't as precise a reference as some of them, so I assume that Parry hasn't yet worked out which of the men in the drug store is his dad. There's only one drug store in the film: the one in the background of the shot where Neff meets Nino Zachetti. However, as you can't see anyone inside it, Parry must mean the other shop in the film, which is the market where Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck meet after murdering her husband. There are a lot of men in the market, though, which means we have to go through a process of elimination.

This one's too old:

This one's way too old:

This one, passing by outside the phone booth, is too skinny:

In fact, once we've examined and eliminated almost every single man who passes through the frame in the drug store scenes, there's only one possible man left:

See that blurry, indistinct shopper in front of Fred MacMurray's nose? That's him. That's Eddie Hall.

Sources -- www.imdb.com, Stills from The Blue Dahlia and Detour, public domain; Still from Another Thin Man (c)Warner Brothers; Stills from Double Indemnity (c)Universal.

The Fishermen

Frank Bigelow does not like the Fishermen, the house band of the Fisherman jazz club in DOA (1950). Frank's a small-town accountant who's trying to get a little space between him and Paula, his secretary, a suffocatingly clingy and manipulative girl who he's regretting having promised to marry. So he's taken himself off for a few days' holiday in San Francisco, a conurbation large enough to give him a decent chance of picking up a loose woman or two who won't badger him constantly about marriage, and far enough away to reduce the likelihood of, say, bumping into Paula's mother as he leaves a "bachelor bar".

But he's overextended himself somewhat and has ended up in this scuzzy, nautically themed jazz club where he is discovering that he absolutely cannot stand jazz music, jazz musicians or jazz fans.

A few of the jazz fans get Frank's goat most especially. First, there's this desperate, attention-seeking schoolteacher type:

She shouts, "Cool, cool! Really cool!" as she sways from side to side, but her heart isn't in it and she quickly sits down again, as if it's occurred to her just how horrifyingly white she sounds.

Then there's the rather affected beatnik character at her table, the one she's trying to impress:

She's out of luck, though, as he has eyes only for the band. "Blow it! Blow up a storm, fisherman!" he mutters feverishly. Probably high on pot.

Across the way, there's an unpleasant young man in a vulgar sports coat:

He's ignoring his girl, too, prattling away to himself with his eyes closed, "Stay with it, Fishermen! That's it! Go on, go on, go on! Get it, get it, Fishermen!"

What a bunch of phoneys! Nobody can like this music! Perhaps most of all, though, Frank hates the depressing crowd of hopeless out-of-town salesmen and local department store buyers he's ended up with. Embarrassingly, one of the salesmen tries out a bit of slang he's picked up, announcing, "Man, am I hip!" In return, a buyer embarrasses herself as well, replying, "You're from nowhere! Nowhere!"

And the wife of one of the salesmen is coming on to Frank really strong, right in front of her husband. This evening couldn't get any more sleazy if it tried. Dammit! If a guy's got to sit in this crummy dive, he should at least be sitting with some of those potentially easy San Francisco beatnik chicks. At last, after being bashed into by a guy who's dancing like he's having an epileptic fit while screaming, bizarrely, "I got eyes! I got eyes!", he makes for the bar, where he's bashed into again, this time by some jazz creep with a Mexican moustache:

"Don't buy me, man! I'm being enlightened!" the degenerate says when the barman tells him to "come down".

There's no way Frank's leaving this place without hooking up with someone, though. He's only got a few days in town before it's back home to Paula and her complicated, passive-aggressive emotional blackmailing. Frank spies a lone blonde down the end of the bar. She's a cut above the punks and potheads in the place. She's got class. That's a fur stole she's wearing, and swanky jewellery, too:

She's his last hope. He hustles over to her and buys her a drink. However, with a dreamy gaze towards the band, she says, "Dig the Fishermen. That's really silk, isn't it?"

Dig? Silk? What are you talking about? The honking, screeching, sweating negroes up there on the stage? Frank should give up and get out while he can. But he doesn't, so desperate is he for non-Paula sex. Instead, he presses on, unwittingly inviting swift and dire retribution from B-movie justice, which has arranged for his bourbon to be spiked with what we later discover to be a "luminous poison", which will inevitably kill him in a matter of days. As the film progresses, we learn that he's been poisoned as part of an unlikely conspiracy involving assorted gangsters and hoodlums as yet unknown to him, but the audience is well aware of the truth of the matter: in the movies, in 1950, contemplating cheating on your fiance was a crime punishable by death.

Anyway, that's Frank out of the way. How about the Fishermen?

First up, on the saxophone, we have James Von Streeter:

Just as Lars von Trier was to do many years later, James added the "von" to his name as a homage to his favourite director, Erich von Stroheim. (What's with these von Stroheim fans?) He was the band leader of Von Streeter and his Wig Poppers, from which came most of the other Fishermen. His heroin addiction killed him in 1960.

On trumpet, we have Mr Teddy Buckner:

Known as Mr Horn "throughout Europe and the Orient, as well as the United States", according to his publicity material, Teddy Buckner toured with great success until picking up a regular gig playing in the Dixieland band in Disneyland's New Orleans Square from 1965 to 1981. His lack of a heroin addiction meant that he didn't die until he'd reached the age of 85. Look and learn, Von Streeter.

On bass, Shifty Henry:

Shifty played double bass, saxophone, oboe and trumpet and wrote songs under a variety of pseudonyms, including -- again with the "von" -- Baron von Shifte, Esq. He was a well-known musician in Los Angeles in the 50s and gets a mention in Jailhouse Rock: "Shifty Henry said to Bugs, for heaven's sake/ No one's looking, now's a chance to make a break." He died at the age of 37, but I can't find out what he died from. Perhaps he had impure thoughts while engaged to be married; I hear that's fatal.

On drums, we have Mr Cake Witchard and, on piano, Ray Laurie:

Unfortunately, information is pretty light on these two. Presumably, they were members of the Wig Poppers at some time. Can you make out the object at the bottom left of Ray's picture? That's the sole of his shoe. That's how he played piano, with his leg sticking out at right angles to his body.

Teddy Buckner played the trumpet in four or five other films, but DOA is the only film that any of the other Fishermen appeared in. It would be nice, in that case, if the music we hear in the jazz club were actually played by them but, sadly, another band was brought in to record the songs when it was discovered that, for some reason, the Fishermen's sound track was unusable. Man, that's from nowhere! Nowhere!

Here's a clip of the Fishermen blowing up a storm:

Sources -- imdb.com, batesmeyer.com/shiftyhenry/idex.html; Stills from DOA, public domain.

Colleen Alpaugh

William Bendix's horrible thuggish villain in The Dark Corner (1946) can't get a break. Not only does his complex criminal scheme require him to wear a white suit, which is impossible to keep clean, but every time he goes to the payphone in his incredibly depressing boarding house he's plagued by this half-starved waif who sits on the steps and stares -- sits and stares! Sits and stares! What does she want? Is she an imbecile? Why doesn't she speak? Why does she blow on that slide whistle whenever he walks away? One of these days, he's going to make some big-time dough off of one of his schemes and he's going to rent himself a big pad on the upper east side, one of them big swanky joints with the marble lions and the potted palms all over the place; the kind of establishment where you don't gotta have Little Orphan Annie gazing at you with those big eyes all the time, where a guy don't haveta get grime all over his suit just from lying on his goddam bed.

Actually, one of these days he's going to get pitched out of the 43rd floor of a skyscraper by his evil boss, but he doesn't know that at this point.

The girl is played by Colleen Alpaugh, who was nine years old at the time.

For a lot of the bit-part actors whose lives I've been able to find out anything about, acting was a career that came along after other things had dried up. In many cases, the thing that dried up was Vaudeville or one of the other traditional pre-movie entertainments. Colleen Alpaugh's story is entirely the opposite, however. This film is the first of only two she appeared in -- by the time she was 11, she was out of movies for good.

In 1948, the year of her second bit part, her name appeared as a prize-winner in a list of acts at a local horse show: "Colleen Alpaugh, Junior Roper". In the years following this breakthrough, she features in advertisements like this one:

As a tiny movie cowgirl roping artist, she appeared on the bill whenever Nep Hovey was booked to MC at hoedowns and hootenannies that were held at the openings of superstores, mini-marts and so on across California. Who was Nep Hovey? No idea. He supped no sarsparillas in the background of any 1940s B-movies, so he's of no concern to us. Maybe he was a radio guy; the internet hasn't bothered itself too much with them.

The next time Colleen shows up, in 1954, she's working with the Clyde Beatty circus, one of the biggest travelling circuses in America:

At 18, she's one of the best elephant trainers in the country. So the circus tells us, and why would we argue with the circus? Another paper reports excitedly that patrons of the circus can see her "in a display of mighty mammals in the most unusual exhibition of pachydermic skill the world has ever known."

A year later, a journalist in Long Beach interviewed the characters he encountered as he roamed around the Clyde Beatty circus trailers. He came across Colleen, an "elephant girl", sitting on the steps of the wardrobe wagon that was operated by her mother, Beth. (Did Colleen's mother work in the circus in order to chaperone Colleen or did Colleen end up in the circus because her mother was a circus person? A mystery.) The journalist had seen the elephants in their cages and thought they might be a little frightening for such a young girl to work with. Colleen told him: "I got squashed between two elephants. It didn't hurt much. It was only for a few seconds. I'm still here." As she rose to go into the trailer, she said, "I'm not afraid of elephants or any other animals. Just spiders."

Even if she wasn't afraid of them, she must have been aware of the ever-present danger of being squashed. Perhaps those few asphyxiating seconds when the brutish creatures unwittingly pressed together, enveloping her in their cracked, grey hides and squeezing the breath from her lungs convinced her that she should diversify. Or perhaps there's only so long you can be an elephant girl before you get tired of looking at elephants all the time. In any case, by 1961, she's become an aerialist as well, as we find out the next time she appears in the press:

She's 24 by this time, and it's the last time she shows up in the papers, as far as I can see. What became of her? Most likely, she got married, had kids and stopped performing. Would you be happier if you'd found out she'd perished tragically when, terrified by the sight of a loathsome spider that had accidentally smuggled itself onto her trapeze, she let go and plummeted to the sawdust, where she was squashed by an elephant? I admit it would make a neat end to this story, which we don't have otherwise.

She was born in 1937, so, as I write this, she's either just turned 70 or is just about to. In lieu of a proper ending, I'll finish with a photograph of her from 1959, which I found on a brilliant website run by an old circus performer who posts snapshots of old-time circuses and circus people. She's second from the right, with her eyes closed.

Happy 70th birthday, Colleen!

Sources -- www.newspaperarchive.com (The Van Nuys News, 17 November 1949; Humboldt Standard, 13 May 1954; Long Beach Press-Telegram, 11 April 1955; The Chronicle Telegram, 31 July 1961), http://yesterdaystowns.blogspot.com , Stills from The Dark Corner (1946) (c)20th Century Fox

Sean McClory

Sean McClory started out in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin just as the glorious days of Yeats, Synge and O'Casey were ending and the bad years, when it produced mainly simple farces about humorous peasants, were beginning. In hindsight, this was typical of the kind of luck that Sean had his whole life, but he didn't know that at the time. Maybe it was his dissatisfaction with playing ethnic stereotypes in underfunded productions that led him to accept a talent scout's offer of a contract in Hollywood. I hope it wasn't, though, because, as soon as he got to the States, RKO Pictures put him to work playing various Irish policemen in a series of Dick Tracy B-pictures.

Here he is in Dick Tracy's Dilemma (1947), a tiny role, but his first ever film appearance:

He's explaining to Dick Tracy that he called headquarters when he noticed that the nightwatchman at a warehouse had inexplicably left his post. What he should be asking himself, of course, is why -- why? -- the scriptwriter thought it plausible that headquarters would send out Dick Tracy, their top homicide detective, to investigate a case that would most likely be solved by a trip to the nearest late-night bar.

Regardless of the quality of the script and the size of his role, it's still a Hollywood movie and Sean is determined to show off his stage-honed acting skills. In his next (and final) scene, he's merely required to stand in the background and look cop-like while Dick Tracy talks to the owner of the warehouse. However, he manages to make the best use of his screen time by shrewdly working in a bit of actorly business that involves him adjusting his hat so that it's at exactly the same jaunty angle that it was at before he adjusted it:

That's the Abbey Theatre way. You show 'em, Sean.

He got even fewer lines in his next film, Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947), but he was surely thrilled to find himself manhandling a genuine screen legend:

It's Boris Karloff! He's playing a criminal mastermind who is such a genius that he's accidentally paralysed himself by sniffing an unlabelled test-tube that contains a mysterious chemical. Sean, an Irish cop, assumes he's simply passed-out drunk -- why not? He's been that way himself plenty o' times, to be sure -- and sends him off to the drunk tank.

After four films, RKO chose not to renew Sean's contract, which must have been a terrible shock for the poor young man. Four walk-on parts in two years and that's it? Didn't they notice that cool bit of stuff with the hat? Years later, in the 1970s, when he was interviewed for the launch of a television series in which he had a supporting role (he played, inevitably, a retired Irish policeman; it lasted only one series), he spoke about that time, saying that he had left Hollywood and taken himself off to work in a goldmine in Nevada (without luck) before getting a job as a crewman on a boat going around the world. Eventually, he ended up in San Francisco's bowery, selling his blood at $4 a pint. He told the interviewer that his make-up kit -- one of his last remaining possessions in all the world! -- came in handy when he was able to donate two pints of blood in a single day by disguising himself on his return visit to the hospital. Maybe. Or maybe that's a light-hearted embellishment that he added to the anecdote when he realised it had come out sounding a little more bleak than he meant it to.

He got work with a detective agency as well, but he doesn't seem to have been much use as a private eye. Having been assigned to covertly film a man whose insurance company believed was faking a bad back, he had the snappy idea of flattening a tyre on the man's car, so that he could film him changing it. The idea was good but, of course, the luck was bad: "I had just let the air out of the tire when the guy came out of his house. I ducked fast and rolled under his car but, as he started down the drive, he saw me lying there. Well, he almost had a heart attack. And then, of course, he got mad. He didn't believe whatever lame excuse I came up with, and called the cops. They drove me around the corner and let me go. I was lucky -- the guy socked the agent who took over from me."(1)

A friend got him a bit-part in a Warner Brothers film and he started to pick up other small roles. However, those hard times had left their mark on him. Compare the puppyish face of the uncredited policeman that he played in Dick Tracy's Dilemma with the puffy, tired face of the uncredited policeman that he played in Niagara (1953), which came out just six years later, when he was only 29:

Perhaps Hollywood was just waiting for him to develop into a craggy Irishman-type, because for the rest of the 50s, he got a decent amount of work, including a decent-sized role -- at last! -- as the villain in the poorly received Ring of Fear (1954), which starred crime writer Mickey Spillane as a crime writer called Mickey Spillane who investigates a string of nefarious incidents in a circus. Here's Sean as the evil bogus ringmaster:

It pleased me hugely to discover that, as far as I can see, the only positive comment about the film in contemporary reviews concerns Sean. Wood Soanes of the Oakland Tribune wrote: "There's only one performance of note, that of one Sean McClory, a homicidal maniac who escapes from the booby hatch"(2). Also, he looks a lot more healthy in this one, doesn't he?

Sean started to get a lot more television work (in which, according to the All Movie Guide, he usually projected a "robust, roistering Behanesque image"(3)) and had pretty much finished with films by the beginning of the 1960s. He died in California in 2003.

Postscript

I found this story in a paper from 1949, the year Sean entered the dynamic and lucrative world of the bowery blood market. The final paragraph(4) contains a rather depressing piece of information. Poor old Sean!

Sources -- www.imdb.com, www.newspaperarchive.com ((1) The Deming Headlight, November 29, 1953 (2) The Oakland Tribune, July 29, 1954 (4) The Herald-Press, St Joseph, Mich, August 22, 1949), (3)www.nytimes.com

Matt McHugh

Edward McHugh ran away from home in 1876 and travelled on foot to Pennsylvania to join Cal Wagner’s Minstrels, one of the “most splendid companies on the Negro minstrel stage”(1) and “the most refined and genteel company of burnt cork artists on the road.”(2) After minstrelsy went into its decline in the late 1880s, Edward McHugh ended up in travelling theatre and vaudeville.

He isn’t in The Dark Corner (1946), but his son is, briefly.

Matt McHugh doesn’t mind that the film is a dark tale of alienation, deceit and violent murder, he’s going to hand over that bottle of milk with the chirpiest, chipperest, smile he’s got.

“Morning, lady, how ya doing?”

“Great, Matt. I’ve inexplicably fallen in love with my boss, who’s a gloomy ex-con with no small talk and a rather seedy detective business! Also, someone’s trying to frame him for murder and now people are trying to kill us!”

“That’s great, lady! Here’s yer milk!”

It’s a shame I’ve only got a picture of Matt McHugh as a milkman, as his trademark role seems to have been a cab driver. Nevertheless, it’s a fairly typical bit-part for him, which doesn’t look out of place alongside the various uncredited drunks, waiters and soda jerks in his filmography.

In his autobiography, James Cagney writes:

“One time … an interviewer was researching a piece on me, and I said, ‘For God's sake, there's a story on this set that nobody touches. It's a great story -- the story of the McHugh family.’ But as far as I know no one has ever written in any detail about that wonderful bunch of people. They were all in the theater. [The] mother and father were travelling actors -- with five progeny all in the same troupe with them. They did musicals, dramas, melodramas, farces -- they did it all.”

The family quit the stage around 1930. Of the five touring progeny, only one, Frank, became famous to any degree, getting regular supporting-actor work in Hollywood (usually coming fifth or sixth in the billing order). He specialised in mechanics, pilots, and newspapermen, who “would either be married or get the girl only if the girl was not the one the hero was interested in.”⁽³⁾

Matt and Kitty also went into the movies (while the other brother, Ed, became an agent in New York) but didn’t have the same luck, mostly appearing in bit parts and walk-ons like this milkman role. Kitty killed herself at the age of 51 and Matt retired around the same time.

Incidentally, while reading about the old minstrel shows, trying to find out more stuff about Matt’s dad, I came across a piece in the April 23, 1922, edition of the Syracuse Herald. This guy was also in Cal Wagner’s Minstrels for a while:

After explaining how he got into the business and talking about the people he performed with, the piece ends with a paragraph that should be educational to anyone who thinks that blackface minstrelsy wasn’t irredeemably racist:

He had ivy from the grave of John Wilkes Booth growing in his garden? How about that for creepy?

Sources -- www.imdb.com, www.irishmafia.us/mchugh.html, www.newspaperarchive.com ((1)the Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune 1920, (2)Nov 13 and the Atchison Globe, 1883, Oct 6, (3)imdb.com biography of Frank McHugh)

The Lochester Sentinel

Although it has never received the recognition that similarly fictional newspapers such as Citizen Kane's St Louis Daily Inquirer or Superman's Daily Planet have, The Lochester Sentinel -- not so much a bit-part actor as a bit-part newspaper, but that'll do for the purposes of this blog -- plays a crucial role in George Stevens's The Talk of the Town (1942), a weird screwball/noir/social-problem film.

The film opens with shots of some sort of building in flames. Whatever can be happening? Thankfully, The Lochester Sentinel (proclaiming itself "The Livest Newspaper in the State") is on hand to tell us about the mystery blaze:

Ah, there's been a fire at the mill. And look, the foreman's probably dead. I wonder what caused the fire. What's that you say, Lochester Sentinel?

Hmm, Leopold Dilg, you say. Don't think much of a name like that -- undoubtedly some sort of Sacco and Vanzetti-style agitator bringing his inappropriate foreign direct-action politics to our small town. He'd just better hope that that poor old foreman turns up alive.

Incidentally, that's not a shoddy misprint -- it seems that "employe" used to be a variant spelling of employee in the USA. There are a couple of explanations, but they both sound insane. One is that General Motors wanted to save money in printing costs by using less ink (how could anyone believe this?) and the other is that the man who drafted a lot of Wisconsin's labour (or labor, of course) legislation created the new spelling because he was worried that the proximity of the e and r keys on the typewriter keyboard might lead to people accidentally typing "employer" instead of "employee" (again -- madness, surely).

Anyway, never mind all that now, here's a new edition.

Oh no!

Dead! With nothing left of him but his athletic medal! The Lochester Sentinel doesn't believe in breaking bad news gently. It's not all gloom up Lochester way, though -- the third story on the front page is about a baby mastodon, which is rather sweet.

Incidentally, it turns out that the Bloomfield Hills mastodon is a real-life paleontological find. (Click here for a diorama of its last moments and here for a conflicting, but more touching, evocation of its demise.) However, it was discovered in 1934 -- nearly 10 years before appearing in The Lochester Sentinel -- which makes the paper look a little tardy.

By the next edition, they've dropped the dead mastodon. There's a mean mood in Lochester. If this Dilg fellow's fire-raising has resulted in the incineration of a poor, hard-working foreman and former award-winning athlete, that can mean only one thing, and The Lochester Sentinel is here to tell you what that one thing is:

Lochester will have no truck with your weak-kneed, molly-coddling manslaughter charges! Too bad for Dilg.

Towards the end of the trial, The Lochester Sentinel, outraged at the behaviour of this shifty little immigrant malcontent, uses its front page to call for the ultimate expression of American justice:

What, I ask you, is the point of having a death penalty if you're not prepared to use it to fry a man who would betray his sacred duties as an employe and start a mystery blaze in his work place?

However, Dilg manages to escape from prison by climbing out of a window during a noirish montage sequence. He hides out at the summer house of a law professor, where he pretends to be the gardener. Although Dilg cuts not so much as one blade of grass as the weeks pass -- choosing, instead, to lounge around spouting sub-anarchistic nonsense -- the pair hit it off exceptionally well and everything would have been just fine if it wasn't for that pesky Lochester Sentinel:

"My gardener! He's Dilg! Dilg! He's my gardener! That explains the lack of grass cutting and all the sub-anarchistic nonsense!" The Professor is astounded and in no time has called the cops, resulting -- after some fisticuffs, gun play and a debate about whether it's morally right to hand a probably innocent man over to the quite obviously corrupt local legal system -- in another Pulitzer prize-worthy front page for The Lochester Sentinel:

Did I mention the local law was corrupt? The whole town's in the pocket of Holmes, the owner of the mysteriously blazing mill. And, in accordance with the predictions of Noam Chomsky's propaganda model of the media, The Lochester Sentinel does what the press traditionally does in times of crisis and eagerly hands its front page to the elite interests, giving prime place to Holmes's call for this foreman-roaster to be dispatched forthwith:

But wait a minute, Holmes. What's the rush? The law professor who turned Dilg in has become awfully worried about the blatant corruption in this small town and has been doing a little digging into the case. By means of a manicure, a dance in a nightclub and a touch of thuggish torture (surely illegal, even in 1942), he discovers that the foreman is still alive, having been paid to torch the mill and vanish by Holmes, who wanted to get the insurance money on the mill and to frame Dilg, whose bolshevik agitating among the working class of the town had been getting on his nerves.

The Professor's pistol-wielding presentation of the evidence in court prevents a lynch mob from hanging Dilg, and The Lochester Sentinel rushes to publish an extra edition:

Presumably, by using two exclamation marks to convey its profound joy at Dilg's release, the paper hopes to deflect attention from the fact that, for weeks, it had been howling for him to go to the chair. Just because you're the Livest Newspaper in the State doesn't mean you have to be the most consistent.

Postscript

There's no more Lochester Sentinel in the film; a national paper (judging by the font) is drafted in to wrap up the law professor's story. It seems that using a firearm in a court of law in order to defend a commie activist was no impediment to high office in pre-McCarthy America.

And what's that in the late news bulletins to the left of the professor's picture? It turns out to be an AP story that appeared in, among other papers, the Charleston Gazette of 27 September, 1934:

I searched the newspaper's archives for the rest of 1934, but, although I found an extraordinary number of stories about black men being lynched, mutilated and burned for allegedly molesting white women, there was no follow-up story about the chain-gang escapees, which might mean that those nine men stayed as free as Leopold Dilg -- even if they had to do it without the help of a supreme court nominee.

Sources --  www.newspaperarchive.com (the Charleston Gazette, 27 Sept 1934), Stills from The Talk of the Town (1942) (c)Columbia Classics

Helene Stanley

Towards the end of The Asphalt Jungle (1950), when a successful heist is turning  into a huge disaster, the criminal genius with child-molesting tendencies, Doc Riedenschneider, decides to flee to Mexico. On the way, he stops at a diner, where he happens to see a young girl dancing to the jukebox.

He figures: what’s the rush, anyway? The fleeing can wait awhile; she’s just his type (you get the impression his type is fairly broad, although, to be frank, a little age restricted). He gives her a roll of quarters so she can keep dancing while he sits on his stool and watches her, salivating quietly to himself.

Oh, the foolish, weak, perverted man! Doesn’t he know that the police are closing in? Can’t he see the two shadowy cops that have appeared at the window behind the girl or see their eyes peering through the gaps in the blinds? Is the twinset-wearing temptress so fixating that he’s forgotten that he’ll spend the rest of his life in jail if he’s caught?

Of course she is -- he’s a Jewish criminal mastermind; they’re notoriously crazy for the innocent, young American girl children.

The actress who was chosen to play the girl who would so befuddle Doc Riedenschneider was Helene Stanley. I came across a story about her that I’m not entirely sure of, but which other people seem to think is true. Apparently, in 1945, the executives of MGM held a meeting to decide which of two new actresses to make into a star. This appears to have been how things were done in the old Hollywood. Perhaps it’s how things are done in the new Hollywood, too; I wouldn’t know. The board was split, and Helene Stanley lost by only one vote to Jane Powell, who spent the next decade starring in big-budget MGM films while Helene was given minor and uncredited parts in small movies. It’s a very neat story, but it doesn’t make any sense. Why would MGM operate such an all-or-nothing system? If a starlet is a potential star, wouldn’t it be wasteful to consign her to bit parts just because another starlet happened to win a vote in a boardroom?

In any case, this role in The Asphalt Jungle was to be Helene’s last for MGM, who weren’t renewing her contract. I can’t help but wonder if she knew, dancing for Doc Riedenschneider on the set of the diner, that this was it -- that, at the age of 19, having come so close to making it in Hollywood, she was about to be dumped by her studio. Perhaps I’m romanticising the situation but, when I watch the scene, it seems as if she does. There’s certainly an odd quality to her performance.

In the picture above, her expression is exactly what you’d expect her character’s to be -- she's a high school kid out with her friends, enjoying the music and the attention of every man in the place. She’s having a great time.  However, elsewhere in the scene, there’s something about her expression that doesn’t quite fit. Look:

She’s a good deal less than gleeful. She looks preoccupied, not quite in the right place. And look at her face when she jumps in the air, supposedly for joy:

What’s on her mind? Is there a letter in her dressing room that she’s been putting off opening all day? Did her agent leave a message on her service to call him and she’s trying to work out what it was about his tone of voice that made her stomach tighten?

Maybe I’m reading too much into it, like I said. But just look at her face in this picture and ask if that’s a vivacious, carefree teenager putting on a show for the hell of it, or a girl with some trouble on her mind:

 
Who knows? I could be completely wrong. Perhaps it’s just that she’d put her back out in rehearsals and all that jumping around was killing her.

She never got a major role in a film and quit movie acting in 1954. She’s remembered partly because she was (briefly) married to Johnny Stompanato, the gangster, but mostly because animators at Disney, who used live-action film as the basis for their cartoons, used her as a motion-model for Cinderella (which came out the same year as The Asphalt Jungle) and Sleeping Beauty.

-- Sources: www.IMDB.com, www.glamourgirlsofthesilverscreen.com

Lou Nova

Somewhere in the Night (1946) is one of those noirs whose leads are so uncharismatic that the film would just lie flat on the floor if it weren’t for the intriguing assemblage of weird minor players who add a lurid pulp atmosphere.

These stills feature the remarkably menacing Lou Nova, a thespian whose previous career is as obvious as the squashed nose on his face. He doesn’t do a great deal in the film apart from loom, but he looms awfully well. In his 20 or so films, he played “Henchman”, “Fighter” “Second Muscleman” and guys with names such as “Butch”, “Bluey” and “Igor”. I imagine most of the roles involved a fair bit of looming. In Somewhere in the Night, however, he had the chance to loom under the atypical name of “Hubert”, which he must have enjoyed.

Anyway, if the internet has anything to do with posterity, it’s not for his acting but his boxing that he’ll be remembered. Fans of old-time boxing have digitised hundreds of bits of ephemera so that we may never forget that, in February 1944, Lou was reported as turning Ben Moroz into “a bloody mess” and that, in December 1939, Lou was in “one of the most disgraceful fights staged since the days of the barroom brawls”, during which, Tony Galento thumbed Lou’s right eye until it reached a “terrible condition”. Ancient copies of the New York Times tell us that, in January 1941, “the sturdy Californian [that’s Lou] hammered Pat Comiskey almost beyond recognition” and that, in June 1939, Lou left Max Baer with “the left side of his face battered out of shape after ten rounds of the most excruciating fighting he had ever undergone”. Apparently, Baer was “bleeding so severely from a severe laceration of the lower lip he could hardly breathe”.

How severe. Is modern boxing journalism quite so vivid? I doubt I’ll try to find out.

YouTube has a clip of that last fight, which is more revolting than you’d expect anything televised in 1939 to be. Interestingly, Lou looks incredibly like Robert de Niro in Raging Bull. But it might just be the enormous boxing trunks.

Lou quit acting at the age of 55 and seems to have spent the rest of his life having lunch with fellow members of the Cauliflower Alley Club, a group of retired boxers and wrestlers who had gone into the movies. The lunches must have filled up entire restaurants with these grey-haired sides of beef, as just about every boxer from the 30s seems to have ended up in Hollywood. The random sample of guys in the fight clippings above played such characters as “Fingers”, “Truck”, “Tiny”and “Bobo” between 1945 and 1960 -- the golden age of the looming lug.