Who could forget that growly frog voice? And the jowly face. And that voluminous front porch and double chin?
Kansas-born Eugene Pallette didn’t always look that way. One of the busiest character actors in classic Hollywood history, he began his movie career early in the silent era (1913 to be exact) as a handsome, athletic principal player sometimes turning up epics directed by D. W Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille.
By the late Twenties, though, Pallette took on the rotund form that shaped his career as a distinctive supporting actor. One of his best known movies was 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn and Olivia DeHavilland. He played the role of Friar Tuck, a part that supposedly had been slated for fellow character actor, Guy Kibbee.
Pallette also had parts in six Oscar-nominated best picture outings: 1929’s The Love Parade; 1932’s Shanghai Express, directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Marlene Dietrich; 1937’s One Hundred Men and a Girl with Deanna Durbin and Adolphe Menjou; Robin Hood; 1939’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington from director Frank Capra and starring James Stewart and Jean Arthur; and Ernst Libitsch’s 1943 version of Heaven Can Wait with Gene Tierney and Don Ameche.
Pallette can also be seen to advantage in the 1936 comedy with a message, My Man Godfrey, starring William Powell and a delightful Carole Lombard.
To appreciate Pallette at his growly best, why not check out Suspense, a 1946 noirish drama about shenanigans behind the scenes at a big-time ice-skating revue. The picture co-stars Barry Sullivan, Albert Dekker and a surprisingly seductive Bonita Granville as a spurned gangster’s mistress bent on revenge. Palette plays a figure-skating impresario’s deep-voiced managerial assistant.
The figure skater-star of the picture is Belita (yes, just one name), otherwise known as “Belita, the Ice Maiden.” A helleva skater, she performs several big production numbers (staged by Nick Castle), notably one involving a jump through a circle of knives (See below. Ouch!) . Of course, the bad guy would attempt to slice and dice her to death by rigging the prop.
The director of photography of Suspense, Karl Struss, gives the movie a first-class look, moodily appropriate to its tough subject matter — adultery, revenge, murder. Belita’s performance is surprisingly saucy, and she looks in tip-top shape. But the movie’s big bonus is the amusingly gruff presence of Pallette (yes, that’s him below).
Suspense was his movie swan song. Pallette died at the age of 65 of throat cancer in 1954, after logging appearances in more than 250 movies (his career predated tv) over some 30 years.
In my opinion, one of the best things about the old studio system was the large stable of talented character actors. Nothing like it exists today. For me, it is the equivalent of travelling somewhere new and running across my favorite restaurant chain -it gives me a sense of familiarity, comfort and security because I know exactly what to expect. Eugene Pallette is certainly one of the most memorable character actors of that time.
Brittaney defines it well about EUGENE PALLETTE and so many other wonderful character actors, who never made any real money but worked all the time.
Funny, you could argue they had to work all the time to pay the bills. The Studio System certainly had its faults with it’s assembly-line approach to making movies. But out of all that tight control came so many great and memorable pictures.
And with everything already said about Pallette, who could forget his role as the family friend and mentor to Tyrone Power in THE MARK OF ZORRO.
But there’s more to the character of EUGENE PALLETTE…
As Joe & Frank rightly say, Pallette died in 1954 at age 65, but his career abruptly ended in 1946, as he had long wanted to retire…
Writer Cliff Aliperti in 2013 wrote a great piece on Pallette that most film scholars, and certainly no fan had any idea of-
“Pallette’s career may have been cut a little short by either illness or his own eccentricities, and his reputation was later tarnished by an accusation of racism. The latter charge emerged from Otto Preminger, director of In the Meantime, Darling (1944), who not only claimed that the actor was a Nazi sympathizer, but that Pallette referred to Clarence Muse by a racist name on the set while absolutely refusing to eat with him. Preminger reported this to Darryl F. Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox, and Pallette was supposedly fired and subsequently blackballed from movie work.
Indeed the then 55-year-old Pallette’s career did wind down after In the Meantime, Darling with just a handful of Poverty Row credits. The final film he appeared in was released in 1946.
But how then to explain this 1953 clipping from Jet Magazine?”
The magazine describes a banquette honoring the oldest negro actress in the world Madame Sul-Te-Wan, and Pallette was among the 200 movie and civic celebrities who attended.
“Pallette had appeared with Madame Sul-Te-Wan in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) during his early time in Hollywood. If he was branded a racist and kicked out of Hollywood for it, what was he doing at this event? Why would he have been welcome? Or, if Preminger’s charges were true, was this just a wink from Jet Magazine to those in the know?
Unless someone can point me to further evidence of the notoriously hot-headed Preminger’s charges, I’m happy to cancel them out with the clipping from Jet. If at all possible I prefer to think well of my old-time favorites.
In 1949 Pallette said his, “retirement from Hollywood pictures … was forced on him by a throat ailment five years ago” (Johnson). Knowing his voice, that sounds reasonable.
At that time Pallette raised eyebrows with his unusual decision to retire from films and withdraw to his ranch along the Imnaha River in Wallowa County, Oregon near the end of World War II.
Pallette had been talking about retiring from the movies as early as 1940, when he told journalist Sheilah Graham that, “I’m tired. I want to have some fun before it’s too late.” As early as 1937 he had already begun purchasing land in Wallowa County and according to his former partner in the ranch Pallette had even built many of the amenities with his own hands. The ranch became a place where he entertained acting friends who shared his interest in the outdoors, but soon sparked other rumors.
“I’d like to lay my hands on that guy,” Pallette said in that same 1940 interview. “I mean the guy who started the story that I have a country hideaway for actors in case the war or something forces them out of work, or ‘comes the revolution.’”
In 1977 Pallette’s ex-partner, Claude Hall, wrote that “such remarks would anger Gene,” yet a few paragraphs later said that Pallette, “stored all the staples that his community might need to survive an invasion.”
Pallette was friends with Lee Duncan and after the First World War they’d go to the Sierras together to relax: Pallette would hunt and Duncan would train his dog, Rin Tin Tin, for dog shows.
Another Pallette pal was Fred Noonan, the aviation navigator who disappeared with Amelia Earhart in 1937. Noonan wrote Pallette a letter dated June 9 of that year which detailed his and Earhart’s progress. Their flight would disappear less than a month later.
Pallette remained at his retreat until 1949, at which time “he began disposing of his holdings because of failing health.”
So don’t take what Wikipedia says about EUGENE PALLETTE being some kind of nutty nuclear survivalist, who lived in his “fortress” on his 3,500 acre ranch without first doing your own research.
They are so very often mistaken, specially when they take HOLLYWOOD gossip and rumor as fact!