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.