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
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