Al Hill

Al Hill was never cast for his acting ability -- not to be too uncharitable, but there wasn't much of it. Nor was he cast for his looks -- again, without being too unkind, he was on the short side and had a rather unremarkable, nondescript face with narrow, inexpressive eyes. What he was cast for was verisimilitude. Whenever a script called for a line or two from a small-time crook of practically any variety, the chances were that Al could bring some sort of real-life experience to the role.

Al appeared as a minor crook or henchman more than 100 times in the 1930s alone. He's on the left in this still from Little Caesar (1931), a back-up guy for the main muscle:

And, in this still from Bullets or Ballots (1936), he's the one leaning on the counter while he and another mobster menace a drugstore owner:

Burglar, stick-up man, bootlegger, con artist -- Al could play anything in that line, because he’d been all those things, and more besides.

Almost everything we know about Al comes from "Easy Pickings", his criminal memoir, which is either a literary achievement that is "among the most amazing human documents of the twentieth century", if you believe his press agent, or "a crudely written autobiography of a former professional crook", if you listen to contemporary reviewers. He published it in 1931, four years after he'd gone to Hollywood to become a full-time movie extra.

Al was born Alexander Marks in 1892 in Manhattan's lower east side. He embarked on his life of crime when, as a kid not yet out of junior school, he figured out how to dangle by a rope from a railway bridge and steal coal from passing trains. In his early teens, a guy called Pipefiend Ryan taught him how to lift cash from women's handbags and another guy called Street-Car Moe taught him how to dip a wallet out of a man's jacket. On his first day as a pickpocket, he scored more than $100 in cash, plus a diamond ring -- "God, I was tickled!" he wrote.⁽¹⁾

He moved on to bigger crimes, keeping company with opium addicts, thieves and prostitutes, little knowing that he was picking up an invaluable biography and a set of skills that would help compensate for his lack of screen presence when he pitched for bit-parts in his later life. In 1939, when Al was just another movie extra without a contract, a Hollywood gossip column told how he had managed to salvage an unsuccessful audition for a job as a pickpocket in a gangster film. The casting director told him, "Sorry, but you're not the type." Al shook his hand and said, "Okay, but keep me in mind, will you." At the door, he paused and walked back to the desk. "By the way," he said. "Here's your watch."⁽²⁾

He got the job, of course.

Sometimes, Al had to try out for a role that required less finesse, like this goon in the middle of this still from Junior G-Men (1940):

When going for such tough-guy roles, perhaps he won over casting directors by regaling them with the story of how, when a crooked cop threw Al's prostitute girlfriend in jail when she wouldn't pay him his protection money, Al had waited for him in a dark street and beaten him so brutally with a cosh that he'd ended up in a coma and Al had to flee New York and couldn't go home for well over a year, by which time his rotten girlfriend had got back together with her ex-boyfriend who pimped her out for cash to buy drugs.

It's the kind of story most people might want to keep quiet about when they were going for a job, but Al never hid his past from anyone in Hollywood. Why should he? It was all he had going for him.

Once, he'd had a great deal more than that, back when he was married to a young Manhattan socialite who had just inherited three-quarters of a million dollars. She was Renee Boucicault, heir to the fortune that had been built up by her grandfather, Dion Boucicault, the Victorian playwright. How Al managed to get her to marry him is a mystery that he doesn't fully explain in his book (he's not big on mushy stuff), but it must have rated as his greatest ever confidence trick.

Al went through tens of thousands of dollars of her inheritance, spending an increasing amount of it on heroin, to which he'd become addicted. Eventually, she got wise to him and kicked him out, but not before she'd started on a downward slope that led her to a solitary, penniless death from pneumonia in a New York flophouse in 1935.⁽³⁾

Al expresses little remorse in his book, but he seems to feel genuinely bad about the way he treated Renee.

One reason why he wasn't ashamed of the other terrible things he'd done was that he saw himself as a reformed character -- he'd been to jail, where his misery was so profound that he figured it wiped his slate clean. In the mid-1920s, when he was broke and financing his heroin habit through shoplifting, he was caught leaving an antique store with a solid gold clock worth $1,200 stuffed under his coat. Of the many things he might have been busted for -- his confidence scams, bootlegging, jewel thefts, department store heists -- it was pretty minor league, but it was enough to get him six months to three years in jail.

In the end, he only served a year, but that was more than enough for him. He spent the early part of his sentence in the lonely hell of heroin withdrawal. That soon passed, but he still had to deal with the New York county penitentiary's "rotten food, clammy cells, spying keepers ... filth and vice". He took very badly to the loss of his freedom, and ever after viewed his year inside as the most degrading and unbearable thing that had ever happened to him.

Still, not only did the memory of how much he'd hated it cause him to go straight when he was released, it helped him get decent bit-parts in prison movies throughout his career, including one in The Last Mile (1932), which gave him one of his few screen credits:

In this movie, he played one of several prisoners on death row, but his delivery of his few lines confirms the suspicion that he was cast not because of his thespian skills but because someone hoped that his presence might bring an authentic jailbird feel to the set. A similar logic might be behind his appearance with Humphrey Bogart in San Quentin (1937), in which he's given little to do but stand around and look authentic in his prison denims:

But Al couldn't trade on his criminal history forever and, as the years went by, he began to get a broader variety of bit-parts, away from his familiar gangland and prison sets. Towards the end of the 1940s, he started to appear as cab drivers, reporters and barmen -- he even played a few cops. His carnival game proprietor in Strangers on a Train (1951) is typical of this stage in his career:

His face had become less bland, gaining character with the heaviness and the wrinkles, and his on-screen manner had grown more natural and relaxed, as if he was becoming comfortable with what he was doing and, perhaps, who he was.

Every so often, an old associate would bob up in Al’s new life. They’d be amazed that Al, who’d been a great thief, could have ended up scraping by as an extra, working six long days to earn as much as he used to tip waiters after a meal. They couldn’t believe he was on the up and up, and, sometimes, neither could Al. Occasionally, they'd tell him about a scheme they were cooking up, and would ask if he wanted in on it. It wasn't always easy to say no, but, apparently, that was what he did.

Looking back, he’d admit that he’d been much happier in the old days, but he knew that that was only because he hadn’t bothered to think about what a louse he really was. His old colleagues were hopeless grifters and thugs like the ones he was earning tiny amounts of money playing in the movies -- like he'd been himself. At the start of his career, he wrote of them, "I know the gulf between us is widening. The time is coming when we'll have nothing in common."

I don't know if that ever happened, but it looks like Al thought it had, which is probably good enough.

Sources: (1)Everything about Al's criminal endeavours comes from his book, "Easy Pickings", 1931, Brentano's, New York;  (2)The Frederick (MD) Post, Sep 14, 1939; (3)The Daily Inter Lake (MT), July 4, 1935; The stills from Little Caesar and Junior G-Men were sent to me by Fabian Cepeda, of Holywood Clasico.

Comments

[Greg Van Antwerp]

This is actually "Just what I needed to Know" I have a blog in which I recount tales of small treasures I have found while hitting the tag, Garage, Estate sales, etc. I have a copy of "Easy Pickings", signed by the man himself. I was looking for sites my readers could go to for more information once I post. May I have your permission?
Thanks! Greg VA

http://videomartyr.blogspot.com/

[diarmid mogg]

Go ahead, Greg -- glad to be of service. (And I should say that Ive just spent an enjoyable half hour going through your excellent blog. Good work!)

[Greg Van Antwerp]

Thank you for the nice complement. I have completed the brief post about Mr Hill and his memoirs and linked to this page. http://videomartyr.blogspot.com/

Blog on!

[Vintage Rings]

Very interesting post! I enjoyed to read about Al Hill. Amazing story about his life and his Hollywood career. I watched a movie with him, he played fantastic. You published nice images, thanks for the nice blog!

[Term Papers]

I really admire this, I mean it really looks interesting!