“Versatility is a dangerous thing. It's very satisfying to portray many types of roles, but often your own identity gets lost. Seldom does a producer say, "This is an Eddie O'Brien part." On the other hand, while the rewards may be great in fame and financially for stars, the work becomes monotonous. No actor who plays himself is a happy person.”
—Edmond O'Brien
Such are the pitfalls and rewards of being a character actor instead of a star. Stars always get the top biling, the big money, the fame and adulation. But character actors are the ones who really help make a film, with that eccentric jailbird, or alcoholic frontier doctor, or the ranger deputy with the funny voice; adding color and providing depths to a movie which the leads cannot do because they are more or less locked into the roles they're playing, and in a past era of moviemaking were effectively stereotyped. John Wayne was always expected to be John Wayne in every picture. Cary Grant could never play a villain because he was always the romantic/light comedic hero and was expected to be that in every picture he appeared in. But character actors can just about get away with anything in the roles they fill in a picture because they aren't confined to playing a "typical" character or constantly playing the same personality type from movie to movie. They morph from one personality to the next, sometimes even within the same movie. Of course, even that truism is not strictly true as some character actors are always the go-to psychopath or swindler or kind-hearted loser, used in those roles by directors multiple times. But even when confined to playing a "type", the good character actor can find some nuance to exploit, some variation to act out, and thereby turn what otherwise is a stereotype into a standout even for a paltry few minutes of screen time. And then there are those performers who appear as just about every personality type you could imagine and are so good that at times they steal the picture from the leads. Stars in their own right, even if they never got higher than third or fourth billing because they were sought after by directors and producers time after time after time. These people earn their stars through the course of hundreds of roles stretching across decades.
In what is considered the single greatest year for movies, 1939, one character actor proved to be the single greatest of his type of movie performer in that singular year. Thomas Mitchell, the doughy-faced, thick-brouged Irishman most famous for his roles in Gone With The Wind and It's A Wonderful Life, appeared in five of 1939's greatest movies, including GWTW as well as Stagecoach, Only Angels Have Wings, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, and The Hunchback Of Notre Dame. Quite a tour-de-force in just that one year. Mitchell won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as Doc Josiah Boone in Stagecoach, and established the alcoholic frontier doctor type for every Western picture thereafter. But in my view, he should have gotten that award for GWTW because in effect Mitchell played two characters in that film —the Blarney filled, puffed-up antebellum plantation aristocrat Gerald O'Hara and post-Civil War mad idiot Gerald O'Hara; a tragic, broken man overwhelmed by the South's defeat, the ruination of his estate, and the loss of his wife. The man who opens the door for Scarlett (Vivian Leigh) after her harrowing flight with Melanie (Olivia DeHaviland) and her baby, and Prissy (Butterfly McQueen), to get back to Tara is a very different man from the peacock-proud Lord of the South who was so casually enjoying his brandy and cigars while dripping with arrogance over the prospective Confederate victory over the Yankees that last perfect day at Twelve Oaks. You see his whole story written in the face of that disheveled, slack-jawed wreck with five-o'clock shadow and vacant million-year stare.
Even before he starts babbling "We'll ask Mrs. O'Hara. Yes, she will know what to do" to his shocked daughter we already know he's mentally gone in just that first minute when he's staring through Scarlett at the door. But that isn't enough for Mitchell. The truly stellar moment of his performance is when he's sitting at his desk, picking over a collection of buttons as if they were gold dollars, and Mitchell puts this wonderfully crazed expression on his face with eyes bulging, the twisted smile, the little birdlike twitches of the head; mining that scene for all it is worth. It is wonderful to watch the man at that moment when he is out-acting just about everybody else in the movie in five minutes of its four hour running time.
Character actors are never out of work because of how useful they can be to fill in this or that particular niche in a wide variety of movies. John Carradine spent nearly the whole of his fifty-eight year career in character parts. Only a handful of his record three-hundred fifty appearances in movies and television could be classified as leading roles, and even in those he was essentially a character actor, as he was in the role of suspected psychotic murderer Gaston Morel in 1944's Bluebeard (Carradine's own personal favorite). An unabashed ham and proud of it, no role was too small or too eccentric for him to tackle, and he could chew scenery to his heart's content. He played Dracula in three different films including the bizarre cross-genre howler Billy The Kid v. Dracula (1966). It was impossible not to recognize John Carradine in a picture with his stentorian barritone, tall lanky frame and face to match. But he would take any role and make it his own, and if a director needed someone to lend a patina of sham dignity to a production, Carradine was the go-to guy. "Directors don't direct me, they just turn me loose", he once said in an interview and it proved a true enough statement especially in his over-the-top performance as Maj. Cassius Starbuckle in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).
But Carradine could also deliver very sensitive performances, though after the 1940s directors seemed to just let him ham it up as he saw fit, as witnessed in my favorite of all his characters, the defrocked preacher Casy in 1940's The Grapes Of Wrath. Casy is a man who can no longer preach the word of God because he is not sure of anything in the wake of the Depression and Dust Bowl, and has gone out into the world to find out for himself its bitter truths:
"Tom, you gotta learn like I'm learnin'. I don't know it right yet myself. That's why I can't ever be a preacher again. Preachers gotta know. I don't know. I gotta ask."
The other asset Carradine had going for him, of course, was his face. The high cheekbones, long flat planes, sunken eye-sockets, high forehead and long prominent nose formed one of the most artistically interesting faces in Hollywood. Ideal subject for any cinematographer, that face only became more interesting the more it was sculpted by age.
Often times, more than studio executives would care to admit, character actors provide the only good moments in dull, flat, or just outright awful pictures. Other times, they prove far more essential to advancing the narrative beyond the necessary function of backing up the leads, and become far more important than the stars of the film. A perfect example of the latter is in The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (1939) in which one of the most crucial scenes is played out between Edmond O'Brien as the poet-turned-thief Gringoire, and the eminent Thomas Mitchell as Clopin, king of the Beggars Guild. As they witness the cruel whipping of Quasimodo at the pillory outside of Notre Dame cathedral, they ruminate upon the injustice of the world in which they are trapped:
"End it, Clopin!"
"Well, if you've been whipped once..."
"Have you?"
"Twice. Now I buy protection."
"From whom?"
"The nobility."
"The guardians of the old and holy tradition!"
"The very same. They buy it from the King and sell it to those beneath. It's quite all right. You see, after the War —and don't forget it lasted a hundred years— thousands of us went from door to door asking for honest work. And we were whipped for begging! The ruling class didn't say "Work or starve", they said "Starve, for you shall not work"."
"And I starved."
"Thousands did, until I organized the Beggars Guild."
"Of which I am number seven-thousand four-hundred and nineteen."
"You needn't be ashamed. True, we're not great thieves like the nobles. Our robberies are petty compared with the wholesale plunder of the nation.
"I wonder if the moral difference isn't in our favor."
"Right! And someday, you and I will write a book on the truth of beggary."
This scene, owned by O'Brien and Mitchell, sets up the political themes of the movie which are not only key to the eventual rescue of Esmerelda (Maureen O'Hare) but also display the same questions underpinning the struggle in the modern world for justice and simple human dignity for the examination of the audience. Gringoire begins the fight for his beloved by composing pamphlets to sway the public and appeal to the King. When the wicked Chief Justice Frollo (Cedric Hardwick) dispatches soldiers to destroy the printing press and they set themselves to their tyrannical work before Gringoire's first pamphlet can be published, O'Brien performs a dramatic turn as he declares "You may destroy the form, but not the spirit!" His passionate delivery and sincerity, over-the-top in a lesser picture, serves here to dignify his cause. Later, with the nobles attempting to force the King to suspend Sanctuary so they can drag Esmerelda out of Notre Dame for her execution, from which she was rescued earlier by Quasimodo, O'Brien and Mitchell again take center stage as desperation drives the two men in different directions in their effort to save the girl:
"Gringoire! Gringoire! Every man in the Court of Miracles is ready to fight for Esmerelda! (lays down an arquebus on the table) Look, I've got your weapon. With this, we'll see! We'll not let those nobles take away our right of Sanctuary!"
"Don't bother me now. I've got to finish this appeal to the King, the people... The printer is waiting."
"Words won't save her. I've a better way: force!"
"I don't believe in force."
"My friend, you're a dreamer, a scribbler, a poet! What do you want? To prove your point or save Esmerelda?...... Shall they hang Esmerelda? Gringoire, my army of beggars, thieves and cuthroats is ready to march!"
"No no no, Clopin! You must wait—"
"What for?"
"For the effect of my pamphlet on the population of Paris!"
"But you forget the power of the nobility!"
"You forget that the King will read this too!" (and rushes out)
"He failed before when they destroyed that printing press! I can't depend on pamphlets. We'll march! Get ready!"
Again, it is Mitchell and O'Brien who drive the picture in one of its most riveting scenes and sets up both the triumph and tragedy at the climax. Their final moment together is one of the most moving death scenes in cinematic history:
"Clopin! Why didn't you wait? I told you I could save her without using force."
"I thought... that was just a poet's dream."
For all the sensitivity in the magnificent performance of Charles Laughton in this movie as Quasimodo, it is in O'Brien's and Mitchell's scenes that opens Hunchback into depths beyond even those already supplied by Laughton, Maureen O'Hara and Cedric Hardwick.
Edmond O'Brien seemed the perfect leading-man type in waiting when he made his debut in The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, just twenty-five, trim and handsome. He apparently learned performance craft first as a stage magician at age ten from none other than Harry Houdini, then a neighbor, and later would cross paths with another stage magician, Orson Welles, when he assayed the role of Mark Antony in Welles' famous 1937 Mercury Theater Broadway production of Julius Caesar depicting Rome as a fascist state and the characters all in modern contemporary dress. Endeavoring to get his career back on track after Army Air Force service in World War II, O'Brien began struggling with his weight and got a bit hefty; also appearing older than his actual physical age. He possessed a deep and rich but rougher voice than it had been in 1939, so leading roles came few and far between. One was in an utterly forgettable 1956 film adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The other was one of the roles for which O'Brien is immortal in the spectacular, genre-defining crime noir thriller D.O.A. (1950) as Frank Bigelow, a man fatally poisoned with a slow-acting toxin which gives him only forty-eight hours to solve his own murder. Only the previous year, he had performed in the key supporting role in another classic crime noir film, White Heat (1949) with James Cagney as the semi-psychotic but fiendishly clever gangster Cody Jarret. O'Brien is undercover cop Hank Fallon, who is put in the same penitentiary with Jarret to get close to and trap him in the next crime he's already planning, a payroll robbery from a refinery. For this, Fallon must become Jarret's friend, almost like a brother, to lull suspicion, and plays on Jarret's grief over the death of the mother he was emotionally dependent upon to gain that trust, all while trying to find some way to keep the police alerted and ready to spring the trap. O'Brien's character must tread a very fine line between the two worlds of cop and criminal.
O'Brien was often the reliable cop, reporter, or military officer in quite a few of the hundred-ten different film and television roles he played in the course of his career, and also took his turn through the world of Shakespearian cinema as Casca in the 1953 production of Julius Caesar (starring Marlon Brando as Mark Antony, the role O'Brien played in the Orson Welles Broadway production sixteen years earlier). But where Edmond O'Brien really shines, in my view, is as Dutton Peabody, the alcoholic editor of the Shinbone Star newspaper in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. O'Brien's Peabody is seen through much of the film as the drunken comedy-relief figure. But watch him in the scene when Ransom Stoddart (James Stewart) borrows a copy of the Star to use in his schoolroom class about government as the perfect example of the importance of newspapers to democracy. Wordlessly, a whole gamut of emotions play across O'Brien's face as he listens in from the half-open door to Rance's lesson to his students. You can see just from O'Brien's expressions, the cast of his eyes, how Peabody is being reminded of how vital a role he plays in his community, which nearly moves him to tears, and how for the first time in perhaps years he realizes that he matters. You see a man recovering his dignity in the space of a minute, and also his courage.
When Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) tells Peabody and Stoddard how printing any further stories about the cattle barons' efforts to intimidate the farmers and sheep ranchers to voting against statehood will lead to their hired goons coming to Shinbone to shoot up the town, Peabody's voice is dead-level when he replies "That's news, isn't it? And I'm a newspaperman". The facade of the town drunk drops away to reveal a serious and determined man ready to do his job even at the risk of his own life and fully understanding the possible consequences of doing so. It was a transformative moment in the audience's perception of Dutton Peabody and the danger he had placed himself into in the moment he rediscovers himself because of Rance.
The character actor, the supporting performer, is the specialist of the acting world. Without the S.Z. Sakals, the John Qualens, the Ward Bonds, the Alan Hales, the Brad Douriffs, the Jack Elams, the W. Morgan Sheppards and dozens of other names I could easily reel off, a movie is left lacking for the vital personalities which counterbalance or compliment the stars of the picture and provide the necessary drivers to move the plot along and add qualities the main cast cannot do by the limitations of their own star images and the character types they are playing. Without these specialists who can play ranges rather than to leading-man or -woman types, structure collapses. Especially if a movie requires an ensemble cast rather than two or three big stars to tell its story, such as Sidney Lumet's Twelve Angry Men (1957). The one real "star" in that production was Henry Fonda. The rest were some of the best and most powerful character performers of the day: Lee J. Cobb, E.G. Marshall, Ed Begley, Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, Robert Webber, John Fiedler, Edward Binns, Martin Balsam, George Voskovec, Joseph Sweeney (memorable as the Old Man, Juror n. 9).
In recent years, of course, there has been a blurring between the lines of star and character actor, as in the cases of Johnny Depp and the changeling-like Gary Oldman. Also, since the end of the studio system, there are no longer stables of contract players as in the old days so you don't have quite the guaranteed presence of the same familiar faces from movie to movie as was customary back then. But somewhere you will find these cinematic chameleons in the background, filling in as this or that colorful figure or villain or victim or psychotic or doctor, cop, fireman, et-al. Appearing as whatever the script requires and vanishing again like mist in the night.
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