This post was written as part of the late-film blogathon, an event created by David Cairns, proprietor of Shadowplay, the internet's finest film blog, to encourage greater consideration of the often-neglected later works of cinema's greatest directors, producers, writers and actors. I don't have anything on them, but here's a piece about one of their brothers.
The Ince brothers, John, Thomas and Ralph—the sons of Victorian vaudeville performers—were a pretty big deal in early Hollywood. Between them, they acted in or directed more than 500 shorts and feature-length silent pictures, most of which were produced by their own companies.
Thomas Ince, the middle brother, is the only one of the three to be remembered to any significant degree, and that's mainly because he was (supposedly) shot dead by William Randolph Hearst while Hearst was trying to kill Charlie Chaplin. However, before he died, in 1925, he had built the first modern movie studio—complete with stages, back-lots with permanent street sets, processing labs and an on-site colony of cowboy and Indian extras—and established many of the conventions of Hollywood’s industrial system, from the use of detailed shooting scripts to the notion of having the producer, rather than the director, as the person in charge of every stage of the film.
Ralph, the youngest brother, was considered to be a better director than Thomas and was also hailed as “the greatest actor of the Ince family”. He made frequent appearances in the early gossip columns, fighting over women, punching inquisitive reporters and getting in various other newsworthy scrapes (including being knocked out by a robber using chloroform and, on another occasion, having a three-inch fishing hook embedded in his skull). He died in a car crash in 1937, while making a film in England.
The oldest Ince brother, John, born in 1878, was considerably less well regarded than Thomas the genius and Ralph the hellraiser. He directed a number of two-reelers for Thomas’s studio, and a dozen or so longer melodramas with titles such as, Should a Woman Tell?, few of which attracted much comment at the time and none of which appear to have survived. He starred in a good deal of his own films, and in many other people’s. His most noteworthy leading role was in Fate (1921), a film about a sensational real-life murder in which the real-life murderer, Clara Smith, played herself:
In the publicity material, Clara Smith praised John’s acting, saying, “Mr Ince so strikingly resembles Mr Hamon and is so realistic that I have many times been on the verge of fainting as the dreadful events were re-enacted.” Nevertheless, the film bombed.
After Thomas Ince died, John opened a studio of his own. He had produced only a handful of films by 1929, the year his wife divorced him, his studio burned down and he lost all his money in the Wall street crash. That raft of tragedies put John in an even more disadvantageous position than the other stars of twenties who were beginning to struggle with the rise of sound cinema and made it almost impossible that his career would survive. Sure enough, it didn’t. John began the thirties with modest supporting roles in talkies starring actors whose fortunes were waning a little less quickly than his, like John Barrymore, Tom Mix and Bebe Daniels. Within a few years, he was reduced to one-line roles like this doting father bidding his son farewell in One Year Later (1933):
Typical of his appearances in the period of his decline is this brief turn as a doctor in a scene in Star of Midnight (1935), in which he quickly treats William Powell for a bullet wound. He says only, "I don't think the hip should trouble you again" before leaving the scene:
In You Can't Take it With You (1938), filmed the year Ralph died and John became the last living Ince brother, he appears in a crowd of Lionel Barrymore's neighbours (he's second from the left):
By the forties, John was reduced to appearing in uncredited roles in B-movies like The Panther's Claw (1942):
He's the policeman on the right.
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) was one of John's last films. He had a non-speaking role as a security guard whom we briefly glimpse shaking Fredric March's hand when he returns to work after the war:
His final appearance was in Gun Cargo (1949), which is described by one commenter on the IMDB as "an unwitting, dimwitted masterpiece of rank filmmaking, a shocking assault on the senses, and one of the most godawful adventure dramas ever committed to celluloid". John can take none of the blame for the film. He appeared in footage shot a decade earlier and, in any case, had been dead for two years by the time it was released. He died in 1947, at the age of sixty-eight.
Sources: Logansport Pharos-Tribune, 14 July 1921; Oakland Tribune, 3 May 1925; Fresno Bee, 1 July 1927; Waterloo Daily Courier, 28 July 1930; Casa Grande Dispatch, 15 Dec 1932; Fresno Bee, 12 April 1937; Port Arthur News, 29 April, 1930; Portland Press-Herald, 11 April 1947.
It’s been quite some time since my last Unsung Joe post. That’s because I’ve been spending all my free time over at Small Town Noir, where I post weekly stories about the lives of people in mug shots that were taken in New Castle, Pennsylvania, between 1930 and 1960—yes, characters even more obscure than the least successful Hollywood extra. Small Town Noir has the same depressing air of melancholy and regret that has made The Unsung Joe such a runaway success with audiences across the world. You might like it.
I’ll no doubt return to The Unsung Joe from time to time, when I find some interesting face in the background of a movie. Meanwhile, here’s a short introduction to Ralph Dunn, one of the most prolific bit-part players I've come across.
Ralph Dunn was born in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1902. He dropped out of college to join a Vaudeville troop and performed in minstrel shows and melodramas until 1935, when he moved to California to help his mother look after his ailing father and signed up with Central Casting.
In a rare interview about his career, which he gave in his mid-fifties, Ralph said that the first film he saw himself in was Bullets or Ballots (1936). “I’ll never forget it,” he said. “They cut out all my sequences except for one scene. And the only thing anyone could see was my hand reaching into the furnace and grabbing some money before it burned.”
For the sake of a better story, Ralph exaggerated how small his role was. Here’s the shot he was talking about—he’s on the right, pumping a fire extinguisher:
Ralph was never out of work over the next thirty years, appearing mostly as a background cop or a detective, usually with no lines. He continued to act on stage, too. In 1951—a few years after his wife, a golf champion named Pat West, divorced him on grounds of infidelity (he'd come home one night with lipstick on his face)—he played an enraged father in the Broadway production of "The Moon is Blue", a role that he claimed made him the highest-paid actor per minute in the world. "I was on stage for only one minute and 57 seconds," he said. "And the only reason I got that role was because I could throw a punch without hurting anyone. That's the only thing I really learned in Hollywood."
He had a larger role in "The Pajama Game", also on Broadway, in which he played the owner of a pajama factory. When the show was made into a film in 1957, Ralph was allowed to reprise the part:
It was his most prominent appearance in a movie, and one of his last. From then on, he worked mainly in television, his least favourite medium—"Television is an ulcer alley," he said. "You never feel you've done a great job. There's a short rehearsal period and no audience reaction." Nevertheless, he kept working until he died, at the age of sixty-four, in 1967.
Below is a collection of stills from a few of Ralph's films, in chronological order. He was in at least three hundred more.
A Slight Case of Murder (1938):
Another Thin Man (1939):
His Girl Friday (1940):
I Wake Up Screaming (1941):
Saboteur (1942):
The Talk of the Town (1942):
The Falcon Strikes Back (1943):
Laura (1944):
Dark Mountain (1944):
Murder My Sweet (1944):
Conflict (1945):
The Dark Corner (1946):
Lady in the Lake (1947):
The Golden Eye (1948):
Force of Evil (1948):
The Big Clock (1948):
The Asphalt Jungle (1950):
Sources: San Antonio Light, 13 May 1944; Syracuse Herald-Tribune, 14 July 1957; Titusville Herald, 22 May 1959, 16 June 1965, 1 April 1996.
In this clip from The Blue Dahlia (1946), Alan Ladd picks up a suitcase and walks off screen, leaving the foreground of the shot clear for only a second before a villainous henchman enters from the left. In those few clear frames, half a dozen extras do their bits. At the right of the frame, a bus driver stands ready to help women disembark; in the middle ground, a sailor and a soldier cross from right to left; and, in the back left of the shot, a soldier and a WAC collect a case from the pile of unloaded luggage.
We're interested in that last soldier, the one on the left of this still:
It’s usually impossible to find out the names of extras in roles of that size – if they appear at all on the studio's cast list, they'll be credited as "soldier" or even simply "extra" – but, strangely, the IMDB cast list happens to include a specific credit for "Soldier picking up suitcase in bus station", and tells us that the actor is Eddie Hall. It even provides a studio portrait of him:
Eddie's IMDB filmography is remarkably full, and tells us that he had one hundred and seventy-five roles between 1937 and 1947, almost entirely of the most minor sort. To that extent, Eddie’s career history is similar to those of countless extras who made their living mostly by appearing in crowd scenes. However, unlike them, his IMDB page includes detailed descriptions of those appearances—each description obviously added by someone who clearly wants us to know who Eddie was; someone who wants to record the fact that Eddie played “Man winning slot machine payout” in The Road to Rio (1938); “Creditor Swatting Applauding Stockholder With His Hat” in Argentine Nights (1940); “First Father Handing Out Cigars” in Oh, Baby! (1944); “Man walking down gangplank with woman” in Zombies on Broadway (1945); and dozens of other tiny roles like the mechanic in the background of this still from Detour (1945):
These are the smallest of roles but, thanks to the obsessively detailed filmography, we'd be able to make Eddie out quite easily if we were to happen upon one of those films.
Eddie spent ten years in the movies as a stuntman, stand-in and bit-part actor. He quit in 1948, and became a used-car salesman. Ten more years passed before he married an ex-dancer and bit-part player named Flower Parry (who had been married to Jackie Coogan for a few years in the early forties) and had a child. When he died of a heart attack in 1963, at the age of 51, he hadn’t been in a film in thirteen years.
So, how do we know so much about Eddie’s career? Who has been so diligently detailing his every screen appearance in an effort to ensure that posterity does not forget that, for example, it is none other than Eddie Hall who sits quietly behind Richard Lane in a scene in Youth Will be Served (1944)?
It turns out that it's Eddie's son, Parry Hall. I wrote to Parry to ask some questions about his father and, in the e-mail exchange that followed, it emerged that Parry has spent the past twenty-five years researching his father’s career and collecting any old films and ephemera that might feature him.
Eddie died when Parry was five, and Parry doesn’t remember much about him. He says, “I have only a vague memory of sitting in my dad’s lap in the kitchen, looking out of the window at something. My memories are not too clear at all. The loss was overwhelming for this five-year old.”
As a child, Parry had no interest in his father’s film work. He knew that Eddie had been a stuntman, and took pride in that, but it never occurred to him that he might be in the old movies he watched on television. “I watched Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo many, many times as a boy,” he says, “never realising that my dad has a bit part at the fifteen-minute mark.” Eddie plays the officer in this scene who brings news of Jimmy Doolittle’s arrival in camp:
Of course, Parry’s mother told him stories about his father, but it took him many years to find them at all interesting. “I remember my mother telling me that dad had danced with Ginger Rogers. As a young boy, I didn’t care, but later I realised that she meant the scene in I’ll Be Seeing You where he cuts in on Joseph Cotten at a new year’s dance. It’s probably the greatest bit part he had in his career.”
Here’s the clip:
Years later, Parry met Cotten at a book signing and asked if he remembered Eddie. He said he didn’t, but offered to sign any memorabilia featuring him. Parry sent him some bits and pieces, which came back inscribed with Cotten’s signature and the message, “I remember Eddie Hall as a fine actor”.
Over the years, Parry has tracked down and talked to other old colleagues of his father. In the late thirties, Eddie was a stand-in and stunt double for Tom Brown, whom Parry met in 1987 in a Toluca Lake coffee shop. He remembered Eddie with great affection, as did Huntz Hall, formerly of the Dead End Kids, whom Parry met a few years later, in the same coffee shop. Everyone who has spoken to Parry about his father remembers Eddie fondly, including Noel Neill – Lois Lane in the Superman serials, who was an old flame of Eddie’s – but none has given him any detailed information. Still, he says, he’s enjoyed meeting them.
Parry’s mother had had a son with her first husband, Jackie Coogan. He was much older than Parry, and knew Eddie well. He would entertain Parry with stories about Eddie, such as this one, which Parry relates:
“Once, in the late fifties, early sixties, Eddie went to pick up my brother Anthony from high school. Anthony was to wait in a Winchell’s coffee shop – a haunt most prevalent in those days. Dad pulled up in his ’53 Cadillac – red with a black interior, or was it the other way around? Before he got out, dad revved the engine before turning it off. He got out and sauntered with confidence toward the doughnut house. As he walked, he was addressed by one of three punks loitering outside the haunt, who said, ‘Well, look at the tough guy’. Dad, being raised in lower south side Chicago, had a typical and expected response: ‘Which one of you assholes is leader of this outfit?’ The vocal one answered, ‘I am.’ Dad casually walked over and dropped him. As he stepped over him, he looked at the two remaining guys and asked, ‘Okay, which one of you is next?’ They scattered. My favourite story.”
Parry’s search for his father’s films began in the mid-eighties. At that point, he only had a copy of Club Havana (1945), which featured Eddie's biggest role (which was still, of course, quite small). This scene, in which Marc Lawrence contracts Eddie (on the right, smoking) to perform a hit, is his most substantial:
Parry notes, “I met Marc Lawrence in 1989 in his home in Marina Del Rey, when he was almost eighty years old. We watched Club Havana together. Afterwards, Mr Lawrence posed for endless pictures and signed many items. He was so gracious. He obviously didn’t remember my dad, but was willing to greet and meet a fellow actor’s son. So kind.”
Parry used his father’s social security records to discover which films he was likely to have worked on and set out to track down copies of as many as he could. “I used Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee,” he says, “a famous haunt for collectors. I simply rented dozens of tapes at a time and filled weekends with fast-forwarding through titles looking for my dad. I wore out two VHS machines doing that, but I’d find an average of two appearances per batch.”
Some of the finds were of comparitively prominent roles, such as the pipe-smoking sailor behind Gene Kelly (the one who says “Dames have been known to wander”) in this scene from Anchors Aweigh (1945):
Other finds were of smaller parts, such as the photographer on the left in this short clip from Pittsburgh (1942):
and the first man out of the stage door in this clip from Little Tough Guy (1938):
The best years of Eddie’s career were undoubtedly during world war two. He was classified 4-F, and consequently spent the war in Hollywood. He was best friends with Tom Neal, who was becoming a successful supporting actor in tough-guy roles. They shared a bachelor apartment where they held high-spirited parties that were often mentioned in the gossip columns, which also kept the public informed of which starlets had been seen stepping out with the boys lately. Eddie got a contract for work as an extra with Paramount, and Tom Neal was able to use his influence to get him a few slightly more prominent parts in B-pictures. In 1944, the boys celebrated the end of their bachelor years with a double wedding in Las Vegas – Tom Neal married a young extra, Vicky Lane (whom Eddie had previously dated), and Eddie married a girl called Pat Stengall or Stengle, about whom we know nothing. Neither marriage lasted more than a few years. Eddie’s wife was granted a divorce in 1947 on the grounds that Eddie insisted on having his boxer dog, Dynamite, sleep in the marital bed, underneath the covers.
It was around that time that Eddie stopped appearing in films. Parry doesn’t know why; all he has from the period is a card stamped with the date of Eddie’s withdrawal from the Screen Actors Guild, October 1948. “The end of my dad’s career is vague,” he says. “I know that he wrote and submitted screenplays, but none were made. I know that he hated Warner Brothers, and his work there substantiates that – almost nothing; not one speaking bit.” Parry remarks that, ironically, Eddie is buried on a hill in Forest Lawn cemetery in Hollywood, literally facing the Warner Brothers studio.
As a young man, Parry considered following his parents into showbusiness. He did some stage acting and improv and took acting classes in Hollywood, but he never got any work in the movies. “I had a small career in voice-overs,” he told me, “but never caught fire. Almost.”
Parry started looking for his father in the background of old, half-forgotten movies in 1985, and he hasn't stopped since. It's not the kind of job that ever finishes. Any time Parry happens to see an old Hollywood movie, he knows that he might catch a glimpse of Eddie; that any scene might contain a few frames of the father he can barely remember. Of course, Eddie appeared in only so many films, and Parry also knows that each time he finds his father again on the screen, there’s a chance that it will be the last time he ever does. However, it's unlikely that Parry will ever stop looking, ever stop scanning the crowds of extras, scrutinising the faces of all those long-gone men who passed briefly before a camera sixty or seventy years ago or ever stop peering at fuzzy black and white freeze-frames and asking, Dad? Is that you?
Sources: Modesto Bee, April 17, 1943; Lowell Sun, July 8, 1943, October 8, 1943, March 9, 1944 and May 8, 1944; Salt Lake Tribune, Dec 13, 1943 and Jan 29, 1947; Winnipeg Free Press, Dec 22, 1943; Morning Herald (Uniontown) Feb 2, 1944; Fresno Bee, Jan 16, 1944; El Paso Herald-Post, Jan 29, 1947; and e-mail exchange with Parry Hall.
Velma Gresham was beautiful, but so what? Every year since the twenties, thousands of the most beautiful and handsome young women and men in America had migrated to Hollywood. Some of them - a very few - had sufficient theatrical experience to impress a studio's casting director or the gatekeepers at Central Casting. Most of them, however, as they stepped bleary-eyed from Greyhound buses or stood in line for Hollywood-bound streetcars in the busy streets of downtown Los Angeles, brought with them nothing but their looks, and were destined never to set foot inside a studio or appear in so much as a frame of film.
Velma was an auburn haired, blue-eyed twenty-one year old from Memphis, Tennessee, and she feared she'd end up among the latter arrivals. She knew she couldn't compete with the truly talented hopefuls - she had never acted outside college productions, and her singing and dancing were nothing out of the ordinary. Her only chance was to ensure that her face - her remarkably beautiful face - stood out in the crowds of the lesser-skilled hopefuls.
She needed a gimmick.
Throughout Velma's college years, she would have read in gossip columns stories of people's hapless attempts to trick their ways into the movies. There was an unnamed Canadian boy in the late twenties who had spent every last dime on his misguided plan. He bought a dressy suit and hired an expensive car and a chauffeur, whom he told to drive right through the studio gates without stopping. Once he was inside, he ran up to the casting director's office and introduced himself. His chutzpah earned him one day's work as an extra, but nothing more.
Velma would also have read about a twenty-one year-old Connecticut girl called Shirley Williams who, in 1930, got inside Paramount by sending her dog racing through the gates and chasing after it as if all she wanted to do was catch it and leave. Instead, as the watchman tried to corral the dog, she slipped into the lot, where she eventually met Harpo Marx. She told Harpo that she was looking for work, and he introduced her to one of the managers, who promptly threw her out on the street.
The same year, the papers reported the story of a man whose scheme consisted of sending daily postcards to the MGM casting director, all of which read, "George is coming". After three weeks, he presented himself at the studio gates and was let in, but the casting director wasn't impressed - George had no abilities and wasn't even a good type for extra work, and he was sent away with the advice that he should go back home without delay.
Jeanne Williams, however, proved that a really audacious trick could work when she managed to get a contract with Cecil B DeMille by changing her name to Sonia Karlov, speaking in a European accent and hiring a publicist to spread the word that she was a famous Danish theatre actress. The fact that she was eventually found out and forced to leave Hollywood didn't mean that having a gimmick was a bad idea, just that it was better to be upfront about it.
Velma's plan was honest and had the advantage of being not only attention grabbing but also practical.
Her father was some sort of society figure in Memphis and, before she left town at the beginning of 1932, she gathered together a group of his rich friends and made them an offer. She would legally incorporate herself - as Velma, Inc - for $20,000, with the idea that she would sell 50 per cent of the stock in herself and share her earnings with her stockholders.
Five of her father's friends backed her, with the result that Velma arrived in Hollywood as the most wealthy jobless starlet in the industry's short history.
She appears to have spent a large part of her cash on the services of a publicist, who spent the months from April to July, 1932, getting Velma's face and name in papers across the country.
The initial pieces were concerned with the story of Velma, Inc, and were accompanied by a variety of glamorous studio portraits, while the later mentions were smaller but more important, as they placed her name alongside the names of genuine stars. Readers of a gossip snippet about "just what film folk do when they get mad" were informed, for example, that Irene Dunne breaks golf clubs, Bebe Daniels counts to ten, Colleen Moore stamps her foot and Velma Gresham - who? - cries, shedding torrents of tears.
The publicity opened no studio doors, but might have helped Velma to get on Central Casting's books. She started as an extra that spring, appearing in crowd scenes and non-speaking roles at MGM, Warner Brothers and Universal.
Like many ambitious extras, she moved downmarket in order to get a speaking role, heading for the independent Poverty Row studio, Edward Halperin Productions, in order to get two lines in the Bela Lugosi B-picture, White Zombie (1932). Velma played the taller of the two maids in this scene, unhappily discussing their mistress, who has been turned into a zombie:
Velma's performance appears not to have caused great enthusiasm in the industry. It was to be her only speaking part.
The summer ended with a line in a gossip column. It was perhaps the last effort of Velma's publicist, and it has a somewhat jaded tone: "Velma Gresham is just back from visiting the hometown folks. She's the girl who incorporated herself to finance her start in pictures... and is still starting."
Velma spent the next two years working hardly at all and earning very little when she did. It's unlikely that her father's friends' money lasted even her first year in town. Indeed, the cash that had at the beginning seemed like the thing that would bring her success might by that time have become the source of nothing but guilt - it was obvious that she was never going to be able to pay any of it back.
At the end of October, 1934, this headline appeared in the press:
According to the news stories, Velma had written a suicide note, turned on the gas outlet and lain down on the floor to die. Velma's landlady was woken by screams - Velma had panicked as she started to succumb - and hurried to her room, shutting off the gas and saving her life. Speaking from hospital the next day, Velma denied that she had tried to kill herself, saying that the police had misconstrued the note.
It mattered little what Velma said, of course. The story that she had attempted suicide was already out and, in any case, it ended up working in Velma's favour. A week later, the papers noted that "a kind-hearted movie producer, reading police reports of her unhappiness, offered her a job and she accepted."
There's a striking similarity to the story of Julia Graham, another young extra girl, covered previously in The Unsung Joe. She had attempted suicide twice that same year, each incident resulting in a boost to her career. After her first attempt, in April, a movie producer had taken pity on her and arranged for her to get a contract as an extra at Paramount, and, after her second, in September - just one month before Velma's apparent suicide attempt - she had been given her first speaking role.
It's unfair to speculate about Velma's motivations, but Julia Graham's lucky breaks would have been much discussed gossip among the extra girls in 1934. And Velma knew the value of a good gimmick.
The studios didn't reward Velma as highly as they'd rewarded Julia Graham; although Velma was given a job, it was only a bit part, and she did not get a contract. However, there was another result. The hospital required that Velma be released into someone's care when she was discharged, so Velma called around her gentlemen friends, one of whom, an attorney named Paul Ziegler, came to collect her and assured the hospital that he would look after her until she was fully recovered.
The following year, a small news item appeared under the headline, "Plans Merger". It ran: "Velma Gresham, 26, former Memphis, Tenn, girl, incorporated herself, sold stock to friends, thus entered the movies. Now, she and Attorney Paul J Ziegler have declared their intention to marry."
By coincidence, Velma's engagement was announced in the papers the same weekend that Julia Graham, depressed over the failure of her career, decided that she had had enough and finally managed to kill herself, on her third attempt, by shooting herself in the head with her married lover's pistol.
Velma decided that she'd had enough too. That year, Velma, Inc, was quietly wound down. Once married, Velma never appeared in another film.
Sources: 29 April 1932, Monessen Daily Independent; 2 May 1932 Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune; 10 June 1932 Laredo Times; 29 July 1932 Rhinelander Daily News; 10 Dec 1933 Ogden Standard-Examiner; 1 Feb 1934 Hagerstown Daily Mail; 24 Oct 1934 Nevada State Journal; 24 Oct 1934 Los Angeles Times; 18 Jul 1935 Elyria Chroncile-Telegram.
Walter Neff has just killed Mr Dietrichson – throttling him to death in his own car – and now he needs to get on to that train without anyone seeing his face, so that, later, they’ll only remember seeing a man with crutches and everyone will assume that it was Mr Dietrichson, not Walter Neff, who was on board when the train pulled out of Glendale.
He tells his partner in crime, the newly widowed Mrs Dietrichson, “You take care of the redcap and the conductor. Keep them away from me as much as you can. Tell them I don’t want to be helped.” She tells him not to worry, but he can’t stop himself.
He goes over the plan one more time, because it’s important – because, if she makes even one mistake, they’ll both end up in the gas chamber – but mostly because it stops him thinking about what he has just done.
He’s so intent on what he’s saying that he doesn’t notice the redcap approaching and Phyllis has to place her hand on his chest to stop him talking. Although they’re both acting extremely suspiciously, the redcap doesn’t notice; he takes Neff’s coat and bag and strides off without a backward glance, brisk and efficient, intent only on getting his passengers aboard the train as quickly as possible. If Neff were less rattled, he might reflect that the redcap’s unswerving focus on his job is just like that of his friend Barton Keyes, the claims man at the insurance company – “a doctor and a bloodhound and a cop and a judge and jury and a father-confessor all in one” – on whose desk the Dietrichson claim will shortly end up…
But that’s another story. For our purposes, the star of this scene from Double Indemnity (1944) is the redcap, played by Harold Garrison:
His presence as an extra in this film, a Paramount production, is evidence of a huge change that must have recently occurred in his life because, for the previous two decades, he’d been an indispensable fixture on the MGM lot, where he’d become one of the most influential black men in Hollywood.
He’d started off in the early 1920s as a bootblack, with a shoeshine stand just inside the main gates of the studio. The studio employees called him Kid Slickem – or Slickum, Sliccem or Sliccum, depending on the source – on account of his ability to produce a brilliant shine with his polish and rags.(1)
As the decade progressed, however, Harold found himself in demand for more than just his shoeshine skills. He ran errands, operated elevators, delivered messages and sorted mail. More importantly, when the studio required large gangs of black extras for films set in Africa or in the southern plantations, Harold was given the job of supplying them. All the studios relied on certain black men to operate as informal Negro casting agents – at Paramount, it was Oscar Smith, and at Columbia, it was Henry Martin, who were both also nominally bootblacks.(2) Their positions gave them a degree of power over black actors, which was not always used benevolently. The black journalist, Charles Snelson, wrote about these “studio Negroes” in The Pittsburgh Courier: “Another decadent evil, to my way of thinking, which is truly a disgrace to the race, is the fact that when some fortunate Negro happens to edge-in to a little favor at a certain studio, he is the worst task master of his own people they have to contend with. He often goes so far as to tell the white employer just what handicaps to place in the paths of his brothers and what burdens to place upon their shoulders. He is often a typical ‘Esau who sold his brethren for a mess of porridge’.”(3)
Snelson didn’t mention Harold or the others by name, but anyone who knew the studios would have known who he was talking about. In any case, whatever powers of patronage they might have had were diminished by the end of the twenties, due to the establishment of the Central Casting Bureau, which appointed its own black agent, Charles Butler.
In 1929, King Vidor convinced MGM to allow him to make Hallelujah, an all-black musical that would be filmed on location in Tennessee and Arkansas. He explained that he had always “nurtured a secret hope” to bring Negro life to the screen because “the sincerity and fervor of their religious expression intrigued me, as did the honest simplicity of their sexual drives.”(4) Harold was named as an assistant director on the picture, and black newspapers were sent press releases proclaiming that his appointment demonstrated that the studio genuinely wanted to depict the real experiences of Negroes in America.
Harold’s responsibilities involved helping to arrange the casting calls in the northern cities, overseeing the travel arrangements for the lead actors on segregated railroad cars in the south and acting as an intermediary between Vidor and the local extras on location. It was the highest position that any Negro had ever occupied in MGM or any other studio. Harold’s on the left in this picture, looking justifiably pleased with himself:
At the premiere, Harold was separated from the rest of the crew and sent upstairs to the Jim Crow gallery – according to Photoplay magazine, he was “probably just as happy there, for he appeared with a broad smile, his dusky friends, and a tuxedo and a green fedora hat”(5) – and afterwards, he returned to his shoeshine stand inside the studio gates.
The following year, W S Van Dyke shot the adventure film, Trader Horn, in east Africa. When he returned to America, he brought with him two Maasai tribesmen for reshoots. Their names were Mutia Omoolu and Riano Tindama. Mutia was a chief who owned land and raised cattle and Riano was one of his men. They spoke no English and they had no notion of what to expect in the west. Upon their arrival in Hollywood, they were placed in Harold’s care, a decision that was presumably based more on skin colour than on any cultural expertise on Harold’s part.
In fact, Harold and Mutia did indeed have something in common, as Van Dyke had relied on Mutia to supply and manage all the local extras who appeared in Trader Horn. A press report stated, “Mutia, if you please, is the first ‘casting director’ the jungle has every known. In previous years, Mutia collected much extra change through a capacity for rounding up his native brothers whenever the white man wanted a Safari gang. But since Africa was added to odd locations used by Hollywood, Mutia has become the millionaire of his people by producing mob scenes, drum beaters, lion hunts, orgiastic dancers and dusky ladies who can stir up a mean wiggle.”(6)
That, however, was the extent of their shared experience, and Harold – along with Phillip Rifkind, their interpreter – had difficulty keeping Mutia and Riano happy and out of trouble. A newspaper article entitled “Jungle Actors Are Unhappiest Of Film Stars”, though marred by the amiable bigotry that characterised popular writing about Africans at the time, gives an idea of the problems Harold faced:
“To begin with, every bright bauble and color stopped them cold. They wouldn’t move on. And when the lights came on at night, they broke away from their guides and started running terrified into the crowd … Their first contact with anything approaching the familiar came when they observed a couple of women applying lipstick … Believing that, even as their native women, they were preparing some beautiful form of disfiguration, the natives let out a lusty ‘Lubidy-oo-ump’ or whatever it was, and all but stopped traffic.”
Harold had to make sure that they were decently dressed at all times, which wasn’t easy. “Clothes and shoes were particularly obnoxious to them. Mutia, who has stood spear thrusts in his bared chest, wept like a child when his shoes became tight and he could not take them off.”
Mutia, on the left, in a still from Trader Horn
The article says that the only activities that the Africans seemed to enjoy in America were acting, in which they had found “a simple, child-like pleasure”, and watching themselves on screen, which would “invariably cause them to break into laughter and have a swell time.”(7)
However, they also enjoyed the company of the Central Avenue prostitutes that Harold procured for them. After one liaison, a prostitute took Mutia back to her brothel, where, according to a recent history of MGM, “a party proceeded until Mutia realised that his watch was missing.” Enraged at the theft, “he picked up a woman and swung her around by her ankles, knocking the other girls into the walls and furniture.” Harold was called to deal with the aftermath, and the studio hushed up the affair.(8)
There’s another story about Mutia and Harold, but it’s almost certainly untrue, or at least heavily embroidered. Apparently, while Mutia was in a Culver City hospital with a case of venereal disease, he began to suspect that a woman whom he considered to be his girl was sharing her favours with Harold, so he snuck out of the ward and made for the MGM administrative offices, where he hid in the bushes between the executive building and the commissary until he saw Irving Thalberg, the head of the studio, walk by, whereupon he leaped from the shrubbery with a knife, which he held to Thalberg’s throat. “Boss keep Slickem away from my woman,” he said before disappearing back into the undergrowth.
Mutia Omoolu, in Trader Horn
After the reshoots were finished, Mutia and Riano returned to Africa. Mutia invested his movie cash in a truck and a store and set up an inter-village transport business. He settled back into his home life, and refrained from talking about Hollywood for fear of being considered “a big liar”. Riano was last seen on the streets of Nairobi, still wearing his good western clothes, but down to his last few American dollars. No one knows what became of him after the money ran out.(9)
Harold’s story becomes a little mysterious around this time as well. He still ran his shoeshine stand on the lot and continued to work as MGM’s black majordomo until at least the mid-1930s – he was there in 1932, when he was called to testify in the investigation into the death of the producer Paul Bern, who used Harold as an after-hours chauffeur and errand runner – but he seems to have left the studio toward the end of the decade, when he started to appear in occasional bit-parts and supporting roles in all-black films made by new studios such as Million Dollar Productions and Dixie National Pictures, the wholly or partly black-owned companies that produced films for the 400 black cinemas across America.
In Million Dollar Productions’ Gang War (1942), the story of two gangs competing for control of Harlem’s jukebox business, Harold played a minor henchman. His appearance in the credits not only gives us our first clear look at his face, but also finally settles how he wanted his nickname to be spelled:
Harold’s performance is rather good, but it’s the only substantial role he ever took; his handful of other credits are all the smallest of bit parts, like the redcap in Double Indemnity. It’s possible that, however good he might have been at acting, his real value to the black independent studios lay in the intimate knowledge of the day-to-day work of a motion picture studio that he’d picked up over his two decades as an MGM insider, watching and learning from men like Thalberg, Mayer, Van Dyke and Vidor. Indeed, it seems likely that it was those studios’ recognition of his expertise and offer of dignified employment that persuaded him finally to leave his home territory.
The only question is, did he set up shoeshine stands on their lots, too?
Sources: (1)"African American Extras in Hollywood During the 1920s and 1930s" by Charlene Regester, in Film History, Vol 9; (2)Slow Fade To Black, by Thomas Cripps, OUP 1977 provides the information on Smith, and The Los Angeles Times of 7 April 1935 supplies the information on Henry Martin; (3)Charlene Regester's article, see above; (4) Black City Cinema by Paula Masood, TUP, 2003; (5)Masood, ibid; (6)Ogden Standard-Examiner, 27 April 1930; (7)ibid; (8)Irving Thalberg by Mark A Vieira, UCP, 2009; (9)Carroll Daily Herald, 8 July 1931.