Character Actors

THE CLASSICAL STUDIO ERA

The star system that developed in the early decades of the film industry prized certain highly photogenic men and women of great physical beauty and charisma. Yet early on, the public also took to its heart actors who were not so much personalities as chameleons capable of creating a range of characters. In the 1920s, Lon Chaney, "The Man with the Thousand Faces," intrigued audiences just as much as Greta Garbo or Rudolph Valentino. The public also embraced actors who looked like people they might know in life, especially after the coming of sound brought scores of stage actors before the cameras and a more realistic aesthetic to the cinema. The top box-office star for two years in the early 1930s was Marie Dressler (1868–1934), an earthy and homely actress in her sixties. Also during the early talkie era, when acting experience seemed briefly to matter more than looks, the Academy Awards ^® for Best Actor went to the elderly thespian George Arliss (1868–1946) and to such expressive but physically ungainly talents as Wallace Beery (1885–1949) and Charles Laughton. Even the matinee idol Fredric March (1897–1975) tied with Beery for the 1931–1932 Best Actor award by playing leading man and character actor in a single film: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde .

Therefore, when journalistic accounts of the late 1960s and early 1970s tried to describe such unglamorous lead actors as Dustin Hoffman (b. 1937), Gene Hackman (b. 1930), and Al Pacino (b. 1940) as examples of the "character actor as star," the idea was not new. Yet it always seems exceptional, especially after several decades of the studio system when glamorous stars were backed up by platoons of ordinary looking but prodigiously talented actors and actresses. Comparing the making of a film to the building of a table, director Frank Capra (1897–1991) said, "On the top of my table, which is bright and shiny, I have these lovely dolls that are my leading actors and actresses. But it is not a table until I put legs under it, and those are my character people. That's what holds my picture up" (Davis, The Glamour Factory , pp. 122–123).

During the studio era, the appearance of certain character actors was as much a mark of high-quality moviemaking as lavish production values or prestigious story properties. Some character players were as identified with a single studio as the stars were. Peter Lorre (1904–1964) or Sidney Greenstreet (1879–1954), inevitably meant that the movie they were in was from Warner Bros.; the appearance (except when they were loaned out) of Jane Darwell (1879–1967), Celeste Holm (b. 1919), or Charles Coburn (1877–1961) meant Twentieth Century Fox; Frank Morgan (1890–1949) or Louis Calhern (1895–1956) signaled an MGM picture. Others showed up in the films of any number of production companies in a single year. These were the actors like Porter Hall (1888–1953), Beulah Bondi (1888–1981), Gene Lockhart (1891–1957), and Henry Travers (1874–1965) who appeared in film after film in the studio period but were not tied to a particular studio. Other national cinemas had essential "character people" as well. The French films of the 1930s are as unimaginable without such stalwarts as Jules Berry (1883–1951) or Marcel Dalio (1900–1983) (who later worked extensively in Hollywood) as American films would be without Eve Arden (1908–1990) or Edward Everett Horton (1886–1970).

Examples of the value of character actors are legion. In 1939, when Hollywood produced an unparalleled number of classic films, half of them seemed to feature Thomas Mitchell (1892–1962), who played prominent roles that year in Stagecoach , Gone with the Wind , Only Angels Have Wings , Mr. Smith Goes to Washington , and The Hunchback of Notre Dame . Despite his seemingly ubiquitous presence in films throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Mitchell, like other Hollywood character actors, returned periodically to the stage; in the 1950s he also became a fixture of TV drama anthology programs, live or filmed, leading the parade of actors below the star-level who streamed from the fading movie studios to the opportunities offered by the new medium.

As an example of the importance of character actors to the texture, rhythm, and drama of a film, consider High Noon (1952), a movie made in the first days of independent production in the early 1950s but with a cast seasoned in the studios. Known for its elegance of design, this suspenseful western told in real time won a Best Actor Oscar ^® for Gary Cooper as Marshal Will Kane, and also offered opportunities for a range of character actors to show their stuff. These included not only Thomas Mitchell and other familiar faces such as Otto Kruger (1885–1974), Lon Chaney Jr. (1906–1973), and Harry Morgan (b. 1915), but young actors Lloyd Bridges (1913–1998) and Lee Van Cleef (1925–1989), who had been stuck in B movies; the Mexican-born actress Katy Jurado (1924–2002), typed in ethnic parts; a theningenue, Grace Kelly (1929–1982); and a young Jack Elam (1918–2003), who would put in a memorable turn years later in a High Noon pastiche, C'era una volta il West ( Once Upon a Time in the West , 1968). The compulsory narrative economy that the film calls attention to by its very structure requires each of the actors to establish character briskly.

The ensemble of High Noon does what the casts of all films do, except that the limited place and time setting—a small frontier town between 10:32 and 12:00 on a Sunday morning in the early 1890s—throws the ensemble as an ensemble into unusually vivid relief. The way the characters, one by one, refuse the marshal's request for help turns the spotlight onto even the smallest speaking part. By a slight swagger, Lloyd Bridges establishes his character as brash, ambitious, and essentially selfish—"too young," as Kane tells him. Jurado needs to convey strength and intelligence, and she manages to do so, while not entirely succeeding in throwing off the "hot-blooded Latina" stereotype the film imposes upon her. In a scene in which she curtly and abruptly dismisses Harvey (Bridges), her current lover, she has to turn

convincingly from mocking but affectionate laughter and humor to anger and indignation. A movie in which most of the characters except the hero and heroine become unsympathetic, High Noon creates a number of types familiar from westerns, and then works against their usual meanings. Costuming and makeup have a great deal to do with the performances. The saloon-keeper (Lucien Prival, 1900–1994), for instance, is typed as a dude, with slicked-back hair, a moustache, white shirt and bowtie, and a corset pulled over his bicep. This complements the character, who is written as a smooth, complacent loudmouth.

Authoritative actors like Kruger and Mitchell, as the judge and the mayor, respectively, play their accustomed roles, only in a place where authority is being abandoned, replaced by expediency and complacency. Mitchell, who frequently played bloviating orators and other long-winded types, is in the background through most of the film, but emerges at the climax of the long church scene to give a lengthy, prevaricating speech. The mayor's address starts out seemingly in support of the marshal but ends up naming Kane as the cause of the impending trouble. He urges Kane to flee in the hopes that if the killers do not find their target, they will quietly leave town. Mitchell speaks in a steady, practiced and confident rhythm and cadence that belies the mayor's cowardly, head-in-the-sand attitude. Moreover, Mitchell's speech enhances Gary Cooper's performance and increases the audience's identification with the character Cooper plays. Kane is waiting for his friend the mayor to begin urging the men to join him in confronting the threat to their town; reaction shots to Cooper emphasize his dismay at the failure of people he trusts to do what he, Kane, sees as obviously right. When Mitchell gets to the payoff of his speech, he intones the lines, "You better get out of town, Will, while there's still time," with a "we care about you" empathy that proves false when he reaches the end: "It's better for you"—pause—"and it's better for us," the hardness and quickness of his delivery of the last line leaving no doubt as to the betrayal it signifies.

Mitchell usually played weary authority figures, flawed and alcoholic, like Doc Boone in Stagecoach or Diz, the hard-bitten newspaperman in Mr. Smith , or beloved and benign like Pa O'Hara in Gone with the Wind or the ineffectual Uncle Billy in It's a Wonderful Life (1946). While Mitchell could also infuse competent, efficient functionaries like Tumulty, Wilson's political aide and White House Chief of Staff in Wilson (1944), Darryl Zanuck's gargantuan biopic of Woodrow Wilson, with an air of blarney and drunken Irish charm, a stereotype was never far from any of Mitchell's portrayals. Like most character actors of his era, Mitchell played types, but in a system that counted on actors to invest their

types with individuality and humanity, making them into differentiated characters.