Nineteen forty-two was a momentous year for Kenneth Chryst. The release in May of This Gun for Hire represented the fulfilment of a long-held dream. At the age of 41, after 20 years in Hollywood, he finally appeared in a speaking role in a motion picture.
Just over an hour into the film, Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake are hiding out in a railway yard which is surrounded by cops, and have found shelter inside the husk of an old train carriage. They huddle together in the dark, talking softly, each reluctantly falling a little further in love with the other. Ladd pets a stray cat. He likes cats because they’re like him—they’re on their own, he says; they don’t need anybody.
Suddenly, they hear voices from outside.
It’s two workmen passing by. The short one - Kenneth Chryst, seconds away from achieving a lifelong ambition - stops to light his pipe, striking his match on the window frame. If he looked through the glass, he’d see two frightened faces peering out from the shadows.
"Some doings tonight," Kenneth says. "A cop everywhere you spit."
"Yeah," his buddy replies. "How'd you like to be worth five thousand smackers, dead or alive?"
"Wouldn't care for it dead."
Alan Ladd puts his coat over the cat and hugs it tight to stop it making any noise, but it cries out.
"You hear that?" Kenneth says.
"What?"
"That meowing."
"Come on," the other workman says. "They don't pay off on cats."
The pair walk off. Alan Ladd releases his grip on the cat. It's dead; suffocated. A very bad omen indeed.
This role wasn’t just Kenneth’s first speaking role; it was virtually his first screen appearance. Even though he’d been working in Hollywood since he was a young man, and had come to town after a few years of stage acting out east with the aim of breaking into movies, he’d only had one other bit part, playing a driver in a low budget B-movie called The Secret Seven two years before.
The two-decade delay in the commencement of his career was down to a choice he’d made at the age of 21. While most other young movie hopefuls in the early 1920s found employment as extras, stunt men or dancers, Kenneth decided that he needed a more stable sort of film work.(1) He had a young wife - and pretty soon he had a couple of kids, too – and the purchasing department of Paramount studios seemed to offer a steadier income than he would be able to get as an unknown actor, and at least he’d still be working in the industry. Sort of.
Over the years, Kenneth found out that an accounts man at a studio might as well be working in a garment factory for all the contact he had with filming. But there was one advantage: membership of the Paramount Studio Club – specifically, its amateur dramatic society, which was open to all technical and clerical staff. Kenneth became an enthusiastic member, and ended up starring in and directing many of its productions. In the early 1930s, it put on musicals and comedies - all written, directed and performed by the studio staff - on sound stages on the Paramount lot; later, it staged its productions in proper Hollywood playhouses.(2) With free access to the wardrobe department and state-of-the-art equipment, the society’s productions would have been, if nothing else, the best looking examples of amateur dramatics around.
By 1939, Kenneth’s children had grown up, and he felt able to leave the security of the purchasing department and follow his dream once more. This burst of confidence took him all the way to a job in the wardrobe department, which wasn’t quite what he’d had in mind when he’d arrived in Hollywood, but meant that he was a great deal closer to the actual making of movies than he’d ever been before.
That year, he played the lead in The Last Nickel, the amateur dramatic society’s first 35mm film, which was shown several times in the studio's screening rooms to growing audiences, including a few directors and producers, who were impressed by what they saw.(3) They were surprised not so much by the quality of the script or the acting but by the fact that, even though it had been made by a company of supposedly non-artistic technicians and office staff on a budget of $200, it wasn't that much worse than some of the films the studio had released commercially. The film wasn’t picked up by the studio for distribution – that probably wasn't the aim, in any case – but it got Kenneth's company noticed by influential people, some of whom started to pay more attention to its productions.
It was in one of these shows – probably Trouble Begins, a musical comedy written by Robert Thomas, a Hollywood leather worker, and John De Mott, a mail room employee – that Kenneth caught the eye of a Paramount producer, who thought he had the right face to add atmosphere to a few of the dramas that were shooting at the studio in early 1942.
This Gun for Hire was the most substantial of those roles, and the only one that required any acting ability. The more minor ones included a barfly in The Glass Key (second from the left):
A taxi driver in Street of Chance:
And a reporter (second from the left) in The Great Moment (released in 1944 but shot in 1942):
That same year, Kenneth even found the courage to look for acting work outside Paramount, which led to him getting a speaking role as a henchman in Babyface Morgan, a crime comedy produced by the Poverty Row studio, PRC. His character has about as many lines as the railway workman in This Gun for Hire, but spends a little more time on screen, although he mostly just stands around watching other people interact:
Kenneth’s output in 1942 is impressive, especially for an actor who had managed to exist in Hollywood for so long without making any cinematic impression whatsoever, and it should have been a promising start to a career in the movies. It’s quite likely that, with his slightly odd looks and acceptable delivery, Kenneth could have become a steady character actor in the noirs of the 1940s and, as he aged, the westerns that followed them. However, he didn't act on the screen again after that year. He just gave up.
Perhaps Kenneth was disheartened when it became clear, during the course of 1942, that his breakthrough would never lead to any major roles. Alternatively, perhaps he’d long since abandoned the idea of acting in films, and had simply decided that 1942 would be the year in which he would allow himself some time in which to fulfil a younger man’s ambition before calling it a day.
We have no way of knowing; Kenneth left us no clues. However, we might be able to glean some insight from a 1941 article entitled, "They Ought To Be In Pictures", which investigated with anthropological interest the recently observed phenomenon of beautiful women coming to Hollywood with absolutely no desire to become actresses, preferring instead to find some other work in the industry. Among the pretty young secretaries, script department clerks and auditors' assistants who were profiled in the piece was Ella Boros, a secretary at Paramount who was a member of the Studio Club at the same time as Kenneth.
Like Kenneth, she had come to Hollywood with an idea that she might become an actor and had chosen to support herself through office work rather than bit parts. She got a job in Paramount’s stenographic department, and did a little modelling and auditioning on the side. By the time Paramount got around to offering her a contract, however, she had a husband and a baby, and realised that she had too many responsibilities to risk losing her steady income.
“I decided to stay behind a desk,” she said. “I don’t mean that I wouldn’t like to try acting if I could make $150 a week and knew I wouldn’t be dropped at the end of the first six months. But I’m making more now, on the average, than a new stock player. The best those kids get is $50 to $75 a week. Out of that, they pay Screen Actors Guild dues, studio unemployment and insurance and have to buy lots more clothes. They get up at 5am or any hour to go to location and work until they’re through. And even if they aren’t dropped, they may hang around for a couple of years just playing bits.”
She concluded with a sentiment that Kenneth might well have shared: “My job’s steady. I don’t have to worry about options, and I get 52 pay checks a year. And I don’t have to take any guff from anybody.”(4)
Later that year, Ella had a small part in a B-picture called Torpedo Boat, but that was the only role she ever took. Perhaps all she needed was the chance to prove to herself that she could have made it in the movies if she’d really wanted to. Perhaps that’s what 1942 - that single year in front of the camera - meant for Kenneth, too.
Kenneth had family in Seattle, and appears to have moved up there in the late 1940s. He died there in 1978, at the age of 77.
Sources: (1)The Daily News, Huntingdon, Pa, Aug 24, 1942; (2)Studio Club information from The Laredo Times, Sep 23, 1934; Oakland Tribune, Mar 29, 1938 and Dec 29, 1939); (3)Laredo Times, Oct 29, 1939; (4)Laredo Times, Mar 5, 1941.