Charles McGraw, Biography of a Film Noir Tough Guy. (Mcfarland and Co. 2007.)
By Wesley Britton
“I'm all for new
faces. And I'm not sore at the producers. They give a kid good direction and
custom- written parts and sometimes the kids click. But I get my dander up at
the way some of these kindergarten actors put on the dog. They let their hair
grow long if they're a man or cut it off if they're a woman. They start giving
out with their theories on picture-making and the theatre in general, when most
of them haven't been closer to the stage than the one in the high school
auditorium. They get interviewed and they say unusual things—and they make me
sick . . . Trouble with kids today [is that] they don't want to be actors half
as much as they want to be stars. The craftsmanship, the joy of doing something
well hasn't half the exciting appeal as the dollars or the phony glamour.â€
While the quote above might seem a perfectly
appropriate jab at moviedom’s current rash of questionably talented box-office
draws, it was actually made in 1955 by longtime character actor, Charles
McGraw. He was fresh off his most recent role in The Bridges at Toko-Ri and spoke from a deep well of experience.
After all, from 1942’s The Dying Monster to
1976’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming—his 68th
feature film--the much respected actor worked with virtually everyone in Tinsel Town.
He would play the cruel
slave-master Marcellus in Spartacus (1960) and suffer a broken-jaw
when the film’s lead, Kirk Douglas, overdid it in one scene. McGraw played Sebastian
Sholes in The Birds (1963) but would
never work for Alfred Hitchcock again due to an ill-advised fat joke. He was
among the all-star cast of Stanley Kramer’s 1963 It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and enjoyed a career comeback when he
played the father of the psychopathic killer, Perry Smith (Robert Blake) in
1967’s In Cold Blood. But, as
demonstrated in the title of Alan K. Rode’s Charles McGraw, Biography of a Film
Noir Tough Guy, the “working class†actor would never become a household name. Still,
he left behind an impressive resume of work that stretched over three decades.
      What makes Rode’s
biography of McGraw a very readable volume, however, isn’t the story of Charlie
McGraw alone. The book is also a mini-biography of Hollywood from the years of the domination of
powerful studio heads to the transitional decade when independent directors and
producers took control of movie making. In a sense, McGraw’s story is something
of a case study in what everyone beyond the famous stars contributed to a
changing industry.
       The tale begins when, after working on
the stage in New York, Des Moines born Charles Butters took on the
name Charles “Charlie†McGraw and paid his dues in 11 appearances in low-budget
horror and action films. He then gained critical acclaim in the film noir
classic, The Killers (1946), producer
Mark Hellinger’s adaptation of the Earnest Hemingway story. Over the next
decade, McGraw worked with the likes of Henry Fonda, Burt Lancaster, Paulette
Goddard, Walter Brennan, Jane Russell, Randolph Scott, and directors Anthony
Mann, Robert Wise, and Richard Fleischer in detective yarns, Westerns, and
comedies like The Long Night (1947), The T-Men (1947), The Border Incident (1949), His
Kind of Woman (1951), The Narrow Margin
(1952), and The Defiant Ones (1959).
Along the
way, McGraw was noted for consummate professionalism marred by a drinking
problem that ultimately became his undoing. Like longtime drinking buddy Robert
Mitchum, McGraw was very much a Hollywood
“man’s man†claiming his best friends were stuntmen, bartenders, jockeys and
horse trainers. He knew them all well from his days and nights in all the
watering holes along Ventura
Boulevard. While he showed a wide acting range, he
was most often cast as a heavy due, in part, to his craggy face and
distinguished gravely voice. (Once, his daughter complained her friends were
afraid of his raspy tones and asked him to do something about it. He replied,
“Without the voice, we'd be living in a two room flat somewhere.")
During the
early years, McGraw, like every aspiring laborer in Hollywood, desired the security of a studio
contract. In 1950 he got one with RKO Pictures when Howard Hughes was about to
reduce the enterprise into an ego-fest that ultimately bankrupted the once
prosperous outfit. At this point in the story, Rode’s history is full of rich
details into the lore of Hughes, the feuding Warner brothers, and the changing
fortunes for everyone when film moguls adapted, or failed to adapt, to what
television and a new, younger market meant to the industry.
Without
long-term commitments, as Rode demonstrates, old stalwarts came to depend on
their friendships for work, and Charles McGraw had many. It was due to such
connections that he was awarded a star for achievement in television on the new
Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960, one of the first 1539 stars to be so
immortalized. The irony was that McGraw’s television work, to that point,
hadn’t been the core of his reputation. He’d starred in two short-lived series,
Adventures of Falcon and the
television adaptation of Casablanca, but
many new viewers would know him best from guest appearances on Dr. Kildare, Ben Casey, The Mod Squad, and
The Wild Wild West. One memorable
role was in The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
episode, “The Survival
School Affair,†where
he played the dictatorial head of a
secret training school. He butted heads with Illya Kuryakin (David McCallum)
who was trying to ferret out a double- agent embedded in McGraw's next
graduating class of agents. While Rode didn’t make this connection, the U.N.C.L.E.part mirrored McGraw’s
relations with new actors whom he now impatiently growled at to hit their marks
and get the job done.
In this
changing climate, like many of his colleagues, McGraw was now dependent on a new generation of producers and directors
like Clint Eastwood who cast him as a cowardly sheriff in Hang ‘Em High (1968). Once, Eastwood had been a quiet boyish face
in the Ventura
bars where McGraw ruled the roost while Eastwood was gaining a name playing
Rowdy Yates on Rawhide. In between a
decreasing number of bit parts, McGraw worked with Robert Blake a second time
in Tell Them Willie Boy is Here
(1969), director Abraham Polonsky’s revision of the Western genre that had
given McGraw so many roles when oaters were box-office kings.
 But the parts were becoming fewer, and clearly
alcoholism trumped McGraw’s strong work ethic. His long-time wife left him and
McGraw was now completely alienated from his daughter, Jill, who had never
known much affection from her gruff father. Tragically, McGraw bled to death in
his shower after falling and tearing open an artery in his arm on broken glass
on July 30, 1980 at the age of 66.
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    Rode’s
balanced biography is neither a paean to a favorite actor nor an expose besmirching
his principal or his contemporaries. Long sections discuss the contexts of
movie making during specific periods interspersed with anecdotes about McGraw,
his family, and moguls like Jack Warner. As a result, readers need not be
specifically interested in one actor’s career to benefit from this
contribution. There are production details aplenty about McGraw’s films with
insights into the lives and work of roughly three generations of Hollywood’s best and least
known laborers. Tightly and often wittily drawn, this biography shouldn’t be
overlooked by film buffs interested in the days before an industry was shaped
by summer and holiday blockbusters.
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