Image via University of Nebraska Press
By the 1930s, the Hollywood studios had cultivated a large cast of character actors. They were men and women who usually played and replayed a variation on a theme given them over and over again. They might be the jovial malapropping immigrant waiter (S.Z. Sakall), the supercilious English butler (Eric Blore), the flustered mid-level manager (Franklin Pangborn), the sharp-talking professional woman (Eve Arden) or the perennial mother (Anne Revere).
And there was the actress for whom David Lazar named his slender, wonderful essay collection, Celeste Holm Syndrome: On Character Actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age. In films such as Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) and High Society (1956), Holm plays women who are smart, stylish, independent and overlooked by the leading men. She represents a syndrome because what happens to her in films happens over and again to similarly written characters in Hollywood movies of the era. She is “the woman whose character is perennially single” and “must stay single to support the prevailing gender tropes of what becomes of an independent and free-thinking woman in her thirties.”
Good character actors were, in Lazar’s marvelous phrase, “extraordinary in their one-dimensionality.” They were often quirky—and in their quirkiness reveal as much about social attitudes as the stars who never quite eclipsed them. Character actors were never just faces in the crowd but were indelible for “their distinct physiognomies and memorable voices.” Movie audiences from that golden age and film buffs from later years know what to expect when they appear on screen. The best, like Thelma Ritter, maintained the same persona whether in comedy or drama.
Lazar devotes a chapter to the almost tragically witty Oscar Levant, a talented pianist and raconteur who could make the crummiest picture almost worth watching. In real life, Levant had been George Gershwin’s sidekick and played the role of the fearlessly mordant jester to protagonists of many films. Lazar diagnoses Levant as melancholic with a deep vein of self-laceration; he knows he’s the smartest guy in the room and lets us know it through pretense-popping humor. “I’m the world’s oldest child prodigy,” he announces in the best line from An American in Paris. His quips—and he usually came up with them—were usually better, funnier at least, than the screenplays he was injected into as an antidote to saccharine.
“Maybe life isn’t for everyone,” was a typical Levant observation. And it’s hard to top his image-deflating remark on one of the stars with whom he shared the screen: “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.”
