On Characters

Preston Sturges’s Ensemble

Preston Sturges’s films are a feast of character acting. That isn’t to say that some of his films aren’t carried by extraordinary lead performances: Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve; Joel McCrea and, to a lesser degree, Veronica Lake in Sullivan’s Travels; McCrea, again, and Claudette Colbert in The Palm Beach Story. But most of my favorite “lead” performances in his films are still character actors stepping up: Brian Donlevy in The Great McGinty; Eddie Bracken and Betty Hutton (her first lead) in Miracle of Morgan’s Creek; Bracken, again, in Hail the Conquering Hero; an underrated Harold Lloyd in her attempted comeback in Mad Wednesday (The Sin of Harold Diddlebock). Perhaps no other director sustained so vivid a gallery of character actors from film to film: Akim Tamiroff, William Demarest, Julius Tannen, Jimmy Conlin, Byron Foulger, Esther Howard, Emory Parnell, Jack Norton, and others. Paramount objected to Sturges using the same actors over and over again, but Sturges refused to stop using them. He said, “These little players who had contributed so much to my first hits had a moral right to work in my subsequent pictures.” Morally courageous and praiseworthy, but I suspect he liked their work, their distinct physiognomies and memorable voices; they’re among the best comic character actors ever. If you take a gander at their bios, you’ll see that actor after actor appeared in 150 or 200 films. The essence of a character actor is being able to do a lot with a little: maximize time. And these are clearly men and women who, over and over, were used for sometimes little more than moments because the moments became indelible with their voices, mannerisms, faces, with their ability to be more than a face in the crowd. Occasionally—and I’m not talking about Sturges here—a character actor’s moment, the indelible aside, two seconds of celluloid, will be worth more than an entire film. This is the link between character and character actors that great directors of secondary actors understand: they also serve who stand and wait for their moment. Think of it this way: have you been on the bus, the subway, on the street, passing the stolid faces, some of them wildly attractive or merely passively pleasant, and you catch sight of the animated eyes, face, who has seen the same absurd sight as you, the anomaly, the weird concordance—he or she rolls her eyes, screws her face into an expression of silly what do you think of that solidarity that makes you laugh, an amateur performance? That fragment of character acting stays with you all day, beyond anything else you might have seen: that moment of compressed character.

In The Great McGinty—an underestimated Sturges—Esther Howard has a wonderful three-minute scene early on with Brian Donlevy before she disappears. She plays a fortune-teller he has come to shake down for money he owes the boss (Akim Tamiroff, in perhaps his most memorable role). Donlevy explains that paying protection money to one person is a service because it stops the bevy of other shakedowns from the fire department, sanitary department, police department, all of whom would come knocking. Esther Howard is not only convinced by the smooth-talking Donlevy but enamored, and she manages just the right suggestion of dissolution and good-natured tawdriness in inviting him upstairs and telling him that it’s a standing invitation. She’s much older and is a woman who has, shall we say, been parlaying her own racket: fortune telling, in her classic loose gowns and instrumental use of money and a person’s weak spots, just as any hustler does, so she knows that on some level there isn’t much use in moral outrage. This Howard conveys in the surrender of her position in wilting voice that is a good-natured concession. Her voice, sagging Boston-accented, and saucer eyes are completely memorable, like Binnie Barnes hard on her luck. She played many such characters—her brief turn in Murder, My Sweet (1945), by Edward Dmytryk, must rate a spot in the floozy pantheon—and could convey their histories with a few words. That is the virtue of a character actor: they’ve been there before, and the histories of their roles come with them. Howard’s version of character always adds a strong sense of lived history to her brief turns as women on the downslope of life.

William Demarest has long been a favorite of mine and should be enshrined in the character actor Hall of Fame. Alas, many baby boomers remember him, perhaps, only for the end of career turn he took as Uncle Charlie in My Three Sons, which I watched, too. This entry in the homogenized, life-is-good American sitcom of the late 1950s to mid-1960s featured Demarest as the uncle-nanny to the household of a bachelor-widow father, who was all knowing and all-good, played by Fred MacMurray, raising, you guessed it, his three sons. At this point in career and life Demarest’s character turn as the man who is crusty, rude, a bit crude, talks to himself, and works as a kind of engineer for another man to get things done, had gotten too old and tired, which is to say, Demarest had. It was as though the vinegar, the comically tonic function of Demarest’s earlier roles in The Lady Eve; Christmas in July; Hail the Conquering Hero; Miracle of Morgan’s Creek; The Palm Beach Story; Sullivan’s Travels; and The Great Moment—all of Preston Sturges’s great films—along with 140 other film roles, some in wonderful films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington but mostly in second rate or B movies, had been wrung out, leaving dyspepsia.

Leave it to Sturges to have discovered how centrally American, how wonderfully direct, how perfectly unpretentious a character Demarest could mine for comedy.

Demarest was a great verbal and physical comedian, and his greatest role is The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (though he is really superb in all of the Sturges films). In The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, he plays Constable Kockenlocker—yes, Kockenlocker—in 1943, although the film wasn’t released until 1944. James Agee commented, and please excuse the political incitement, that the Hay’s Office censor “must have been raped in his sleep” to have allowed the film to go through. Perhaps the distraction of the war? But then again, the film was subjected to any number of rewrites to be considered acceptable. The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, one of the greatest American comedies, is about (and here we get to the absurd and reductionist levels of plot summary) a young woman who tricks the man who loves her so she can borrow his car, winds up pregnant and falsely married to a soldier whose name she can’t remember, falls in love with the man she tricked, and gives birth to six babies, fueling the war effort, and all but assuring Hitler’s defeat (I told you). Thus James Agee’s comment. Her father is played by William Demarest; has there ever been a name that mocked the patriarchy more than Constable Kockenlocker? What would a contemporary audience do with that name? I want to be in a movie theater in Brooklyn, in 1944, so I can listen for the response any time his name is mentioned.

As Constable Kockenlocker, Demarest, whose voice was somewhere between a man’s version of an East Side Kid and a goat who had miraculously learned to speak, is constantly trying and failing to control his two daughters, played with anarchic energy of very different kinds by Betty Hutton, who is physical and sexual, a small town volcano, and Diana Lynn, the apotheosis of the smart-alecky and too-smart kid sister. On several occasions Demarest, taunted or driven to distraction by his daughters (several times he says, “Daughters, phooey,” even breaking the fourth wall to turn to the camera and announce it—and as an aside, as much as I thought Fleabag brilliant in every way, it isn’t the breaking of the fourth wall that’s inventive: Groucho Marx, Gracie Allen, Bob Hope, other characters in Sturges, etc. break the fourth wall; it’s how Waller-Bridge uses her turns to the camera to connect to us that’s striking), tries to teach them a late lesson with some corporal punishment: kicking them, swatting them, and so on. It always ends with him on his ass, or worse for wear. When Demarest—Kockenlocker—tries to pummel Norbert, played as the ultimate schlemiel by Eddie Bracken, the father’s two daughters jump him and disable him. This is what happens when the Kockenlocker patriarchy is taken on by women. The brilliance of William Demarest, what makes him indelible, is his quality of blowhard aggressive masculinity with just enough vulnerability, enough actual concern for his daughters in Morgan’s Creek, to allow us to find him funny, endearing actually, and not offensive or threatening. Demarest undermines, in other words, his own masculinity through a kind of innate understanding of hyperbole. That’s his brilliance. He always plays a kind of operator, a guy who is trying to force things, a guy who thinks he knows the ropes. But Demarest knows how to hesitate just enough in his aggression so that it’s denatured, reversed, even benignant at times.

Another thing: in repose, he can look a little like an older, slightly heavier Buster Keaton crossed with a bit of bulldog. But unlike the “great stone face,” Demarest tends to scowl. He has a Mack Sennett tendency to do double takes, rub his face, and turn to the camera when he’s frustrated, which is frequent. Demarest is the muse of frustration, the man of bluster who ends up with egg on his face. That’s why his Kockenlocker is so iconic, such an absurd, central, and shocking deconstruction of American manhood: he’s the figure of authority, the head of the family, the man who directs traffic, the war veteran, and he gets everything wrong, his daughters’ mock and elude him, the new generation of soldiers (World War II) teases him, he’s impotent, thus: Kockenlocker. And Demarest manages this meltdown with, at first, the indignity of someone who thinks he should be empowered but is instead a joke, and who then becomes ennobled by, if not a full, at least an instrumental sense of his own limits. As the film progresses, Demarest allows his bluster (derived from the Low German blüstren, to blow violently, in other words, the same source as “blow,” most likely, which becomes in the mid-fifteenth century on a weather-related term, the blowing of winds, and probably in the sixteenth century in English, the violent blowing of winds) to soften; his rough gales becoming something closer to a kind of weathered grace in the face of what his daughter and her endlessly sacrificing beau have gone through. It’s quite moving.

Perhaps this is the reason Demarest was frequently cast comically in caretaker roles. In The Great McGinty he’s the all-purpose political hack who runs interference for the political novice. In Hail the Conquering Hero his attempt to take care of Eddie Bracken backfires, and Demarest, with the subtlety of a ground attack, moves in at the end to save him from the folds of lies and deceptions that have been forced on him.

Demarest was always good with a line to reprise (character actors, after all, are frequently careers built on the idea of reprise, variations on the theme of a memorable look, delivery); in Miracle of Morgan’s Creek it’s “Daughter’s, phooey,” and in The Lady Eve his tagline is a variation of “The same dame!”—as Barbara Stanwyck unwinds her elaborate plan to play her own double and fool Henry Fonda, for whom Demarest acts as companion-bodyguard. Demarest’s everyman quality, a quality many of the greatest character actors put across (they seem somehow recognizable, not unreachably beautiful, or glamorous, or fascinating like Marilyn Monroe, or Ronald Colman, or Fred Astaire), serves Sturges well as, with his indecorous slang and midwestern accent, he punctures any moment where decorum threatens to establish itself. More often than not, to mix metaphors, he’s a bull in a china shop who thinks he smells a rat—suspicious to his core but also devoted to protecting those under his care. That’s why we like him. He’s the emblem of those we excuse because their motives are pure.

Demarest gets the last word in The Lady Eve, and it’s a line, a moment worthy of the best Billy Wilder closers (he had the best last lines). Demarest, who has been spying on Barbara Stanwyck—protective as he is of Henry Fonda, his smart but feckless charge—has been in wait in Fonda’s shipboard cabin. And as Stanwyck and Fonda extravagantly exchange vows of love, and as Stanwyck attempts unsuccessfully to explain to Fonda the nature of the almost-Shakespearean play of masquerade (actually an inversion of disguise, a kind of challenge to cognitive dissonance, as Barbara Stanwyck disappears, then appears to assert a new identity) that has taken place, they slip into the room and close the door. At which point Demarest, having been in the room with the two lovers, opens the door, gently closes it, and turns toward the camera: “Positively the same dame,” he says. This is a line he has been saying throughout the second half of the film—challenging both the beau monde’s and nouveau riche’s enchantment with Stanwyck’s impersonation of an aristocratic Englishwoman. He’s sure she’s the brash young American he suspected of trying to cheat his naïve heir, Fonda. But what’s so brilliant about his performance is that he seems just a shade less than positive. The ruse has been that thorough and complicated. And at this point, he’s willing, as fairy godfather, to leave the lovers be, though in this fairyland, nothing can ever be taken for granted.

Gruff and frequently mistaken though he is, barking, loud Demarest almost always plays a character who is loyal. Perhaps Sturges could tell that was just in his character.

In the Sturges universe, Alan Bridge defines the obverse of the William Demarest type of character actor who brings similar traits from role to role. Bridge, who appeared in small roles in an astonishing number of films—over 250—appeared in 10 Sturges films but had crucially different roles in Sullivan’s Travels and Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. In the former he played a cruel prison warden, a sadist who seemed to enjoy torture; in the latter, he heartbreakingly defines discretion and empathy, with a slight note of 1940s patriarchal disapproval, still striking for the time.

In Sullivan’s Travels (1941)—perhaps the most lionized Preston Sturges film—Joel McCrea, a wealthy Hollywood director of popular, silly comedies, is bothered by what seems the unseriousness of his endeavor during the Depression and wants to make a statement, direct a film of what he considers artistic merit. But to do so he needs experience of the underclass and their suffering, and so he, with Veronica Lake in tow, goes undercover as a hobo to attempt to do the research for the film that will be Oh, Brother Where Art Thou. (Yes, the Coen brothers are enormous fans of, and in many ways imitators of, Preston Sturges.) Suffice to say, the plot twists in a screwball way, and McCrea’s Sullivan ends up with amnesia in a prison labor camp, a version of a chain gang, doing hard time for manslaughter. His warden is Alan Bridge, whose boss-warden role is ominously billed as “The Mister.” In other words: “The Man.” It’s the comic prefiguring of Hud.

Alan Bridge had a remarkable voice, and voice is one of the qualities we associate most with notable character actors, since an unusual aural impression (Billie Burke! “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” Christopher Walken! “This watch is your birthright.”) is as crucial to the creation of cinematic character as visage. The character actors who became leads almost all had indelible voices: James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Dustin Hoffman, Walter Matthau, Judy Holliday, Alastair Sim. Voice is so hard to describe without referring to other voices—it’s all metaphor. Bridge’s voice was middle range, that place between baritone and tenor, and his accent equally escapable, somewhere on the border between Midwest and West, with vowels trailing off high; it was the Plains, with a touch of Badlands, some rain turning to snow in the foothills. There was another quality to his voice—not quite guttural, but as though the sounds were being slightly squeezed, the words forced out because of some undefined difficulty. This could make him sound reticent and sympathetic, as in Morgan’s Creek, or menacing, as in Sullivan’s Travels.

In Sullivan’s Travels this reticence conveys an utter lack of sympathy as he threatens and then orders Sullivan—Joel McCrea—beaten. His voice seems expressionless. Something or someone took everything out of him, and that flint in the accent suggests it has to do with place.

In Morgan’s Creek, Bridge plays a lawyer whom Betty Hutton (Trudy) and Diana Lynn (as her sister, Emmy) seek out in desperation when they learn that Trudy is pregnant. It’s an extraordinary scene—I don’t know of another like it in ’40s cinema, in which an older man is being called on to weigh in on what was then a woman’s moral transgression that baffles him, and whose circumstances are bizarre. (Remember, Trudy doesn’t remember the circumstances of her pregnancy or the soldier she supposedly married.) Trudy and Emmy try, rather transparently, to ask Mr. Johnson (Bridge), a lawyer, what “their friend” should do in this hypothetically disastrous case. Bridge, who stands and paces, responds with impatient sympathy, which, given the times and the situation, seems . . . deeply, humanly responsive in Alan Bridge’s performance. He begins rather severely, disposing of his paternal obligation to disapprove by saying, “Your friend ought to be ashamed of herself. . . . I mean because of her carelessness.” (Emmy, not to let this by, says, “She’s a very nice girl. It just happened. That’s all.”) However, he goes on, hilariously, to indicate his helplessness (the men, in this wartime film, are largely clueless, castrated, or inept, with the exception of the absent “husband” of Trudy): “Your friend doesn’t remember the bridegroom’s name? And she used an assumed name. Perfect. That’s really airtight.” The women ask if the marriage could be annulled, or the man divorced or sued for alimony, and Bridge says, “Sue who, annul who? Look, I practice the law. I’m not only willing but anxious to sue anyone anytime for anything. But they’ve got to be real people with names and corpuses and meat on their bones. I can’t work with spooks. Your friend doesn’t need a lawyer, she needs a medium.” It’s an intensely exasperated response, but slightly leavened by the comic impulse. And then comes the switch. He says their fee is five dollars, which they should use to buy flowers for their friend on “the happy day.” When they ask if he’ll tell anyone, he says, “How can I, when I don’t even know who she is?” They leave, and Bridge turns with a look of ultimate paternalistic concern, simply troubled for the young woman’s plight. It’s a memorable minute and thirty-three seconds (yes, a minute and a half). But Alan Bridge’s Mr. Johnson has stayed with me for forty years—that voice of umbrage shading into melancholy sympathy. He uses his briefest of appearances as a character actor to memorialize the generationally encumbered parental figure, who still manages to be a human being in the face of someone’s pain. Sturges understood the impact that a character actor could have in a fleeting scene.

I could write about all Sturges’s character actors, but then, I feel I could write about so many character actors. Why? Because they made me see something out of the corner of my eye, and what I saw made me feel different(ly) or think about something I hadn’t thought of before. Character actors are more like us because they aren’t demigods, the lead actors, and also unlike us in that they’re frequently so unusual, so unique: “You’re such a character,” we say to someone who stands out, who’s different in some exaggerated way. We like to think we’re such characters, too (don’t we? Or do I overgeneralize here? I like to think I am. That I register as different, perhaps even strange, not in an unpleasant way but rather in an interesting way) that’s why we like them. But we—all right, or I—are really the less exaggerated versions of the types and the idiosyncratic individuals in the characters actors’ repertoire.

Because they aren’t center stage, there is a modesty to the character actor: even the hammiest, most over the top, schtick-fest character actor is usually not in the center ring, or not for long. The loneliness of the long distance character actor: they watch the leads, and I love to watch them watch, perform their tricks, recede, but not from memory, at least not mine. What magic, to suggest human dimensionality on a flat screen in just a few minutes. What humility mixed with persistent faith, to think that these occasional moments of impersonation, these brief acted lives on the margins of narrative, could really matter to those of us sitting out there in the dark, ensembles of one.