Who’s That Standing Next To Bogart?

A TRIBUTE TO THE GREAT CHARACTER ACTORS

This is going to be a running series about great character actors who are often the unsung heros of the movies, many of whom we take for granted, and who play off, and feed lead actors their greatest moments.

There are certainly a lot of remarkable character actors working in films today, to be sure.  In fact, my own film, DUNSMORE, directed by Peter Spirer, consists entirely of a cast of wonderful modern character actors like W. Earl Brown, Jeannetta Arnette (Jeannetta won the best supporting actress award at METHOD FEST for her performance in DUNSMORE), Rus Blackwell, Kadeem Hardison, Alicia Lagano and the great Barry Corbin, as well as other great players who filled out the cast.

But it would be tough to sway me from my belief that the greatest collection of character actors in the history of films existed in the 1930s and 1940s.

Part of the reason for this is that, in those days, the great directors and writers gave their character actors much more to do than most films today.  Watch any film directed by JOHN FORD, FRANK CAPRA, HOWARD HAWKES, MICHAEL CURTIZ, PRESTON STURGESS or GEORGE STEVENS, just to name a small handful of the dozens of directors who were brilliant using the remarkable character actors in their palette.

Just for fun, watch any film by the directors I mentioned – especially if you have seen the film before – and try looking past the big stars to the character actors working with them, and you’ll see the many wonderful, subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle, contributions they make.

Watch CASABLANCA again and look past Bogart and Bergman, if you can, and pay close attention to the great moments given to Claude Raines, Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, S.Z. Sakall, Madeleine LeBeau, Dooley Wilson, Leonid Kinsky, Conrad Veidt, and on and on, and see how their fleeting moments add to the world that is CASABLANCA.

Dooley Wilson

Conrad Veidt

The same is true of so many films of that era.  Thanks to the writers, directors and actors who created those moments.  Writers and Directors gave their supporting actors things to do that added to the stature of the leads and to the films.

And sometimes those character actors became stars in their own right.  Humphrey Bogart was a character actor in many films behind James Cagney and George Raft, until he broke out in his mid-thirties and became the iconic Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon.

Claude Raines

Sidney Greenstreet

Gene Hackman was a character actor behind Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde and in many other films with other leading men before becoming a leading man himself in The French Connection.

Robert Duvall was a character actor from the day he played Boo Radley in TO KILL A MOCKING BIRD, and then went on to play characters in dozens of 60’s TV shows and movies.

John Qualan

Madeleine LeBeau

Duvall played a cab driver, driving Steve McQueen around San Francisco in BULLIT, he was bad guy Ned Pepper behind John Wayne in True Grit, and was still a character actor in The Godfather films before breaking out, like Bogart, later in his career, to be a leading man.  The greatest difference in this regard, between films today and the films of what we think of as the Golden Age, is that many of today’s movies don’t give character actors much to do.  Often they only serve the purpose of feeding exposition to the leads. There is so much focus on the leading man and woman today, that character actors are often left with little to contribute and don’t have a chance to shine.  This is a loss for modern movies.

It may also be that the big studio system of the 30s, and 40s, kept these actors under contract, so they wanted to get their money’s worth by using them in dozens of films throughout the  year, and often these actors morphed from character to character, sometimes becoming almost unrecognizable in their variety of roles, while simultaneously honing their skills.

S. Z. Sakall

Leonid Kinsky

With this series I plan to focus on some of my favorite character actors for those of you who have either never heard of them, or don’t know as much about them as you thought.  And to get people curious to see the films they’re in.

Today, lets talk about:

PETER LORRE

Born June 26, 1904, Lorre was a Hungarian stage actor in Germany and Vienna. At age 21 he moved to Berlin and caught the attention of German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Lorre became famous when Fritz Lang cast him as the psychotic child killer in M in 1931.

When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Lorre moved from Berlin to Paris, and then to Hollywood where he worked constantly playing a series of soft-voice villains for directors like Alfred Hitchcock in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934).

He then played a hero in a series of Mr. Moto movies, in which he played a brilliant and charismatic Japanese detective as a complement to the Charlie Chan series. But the Mr. Moto movies were usually much more action-packed, as Mr. Moto was a master of disguise and Judo expert (In fact in MR. MOTO IN DANGER ISLAND Lorre has a Judo match with the much bigger, WARD BOND, another iconic character actor.)

But Lorre is probably best remembered for the films he did with Bogart,  The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca.

As he got older, Lorre’s roles leaned toward comedy, as in ARSENIC AND OLD LACE.  Lorre’s look and persona was so unique he became one of the most highly imitated actor of all time. He was even often caricatured  in cartoons.

Peter Lorre died in 1964 and was interred in the Hollywood Forever Memorial Park Cemetery in Hollywood, California.

Peter Lorre, one of American films unforgettable character actors.

Copyright © 2011 Michael Andrews