HOME RERUN TIME—CELEBRATING A SCRAWNY GUY “WANTING TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY” PART 1

I’VE SAVED SEVERAL CLASSIC FILMS FOR HOME RERUNS, each re-viewed when the spirit moves me. These include Pandora’s Box, the 1929 silent flick (its operatic version Alban Berg’s Lulu); Bogart/Astor/Greenstreet/Lorre’s The Maltese Falcon, 1941; Bogart/Bergman’s Casablanca, 1942; Bogart/Bacall’s The Big Sleep, 1946; and François Trauffaut’s Day for Night, 1973, originally titled La Nuit Américaine, “a movie for people who love movies.”

Yes, the list is Bogart-heavy, but, to quote David Thomson in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, there are also “supporting actors whose faces will stop you dead as you flip through an album history. Who really wants to know more about Robert Taylor, say? But who wouldn’t want to read a good biography of Elisha Cook Jr.?”

Here, in Parts 1 and 2 today and tomorrow, are tidbits about The Maltese Falcon’s Wilmer Cook and The Big Sleep’s Harry Jones; that is to say Elisha Cook Jr.. 

The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, by David Thomson, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. 

David Thomson’s Assessment: Elisha Cook Jr. was “small, scrawny; he was losing his hair; and he had a high-pitched voice; he had eyes screwed into his head with all the desperate resolve of wanting to be taken seriously.” 

“Put him in a bad picture,” Thomson wrote, “and he made it watchable for ten minutes. Put him in something good and he was a metaphor for glue, or the medium itself. He could make you trust the film.”

Bio Info. Wikipedia says, “Elisha Vanslyck Cook Jr. was an American character actor famed for his work in films noir. According to Bill Georgaris of They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They, Cook appeared in a total of 21 films noir, more than any other actor or actress.”

Wikipedia recounts, “Cook was born in December 1903 in San Francisco, California, the son of Elisha Vanslyck Cook Sr., a pharmacist, and grew up in Chicago. As a young man, he traveled and honed his acting skills on stages along the East Coast and in the Midwest before arriving in New York City, where in 1926 he debuted on  Broadway in Hello, Lola.” 

Other Broadway productions followed and, “in 1933, Eugene O’Neill cast him in the role of Richard Miller in his play Ah, Wilderness, which ran on Broadway for two years.”

Elisha Vanslyck Cook Jr., 1903–1995, American character actor, here portraying Kirk Otto, one of John Dillinger’s gang. Image from Dillinger (1945).

Cook’s character gets it in Dillinger, as he did perhaps after The Maltese Falcon and decidedly in The Big Sleep.  Tomorrow in Part 2, though, we’ll see him as something of a song-and-dance man and a real-life fly fisherman. ds 

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024