HOME RERUN TIME—CELEBRATING A SCRAWNY GUY “WANTING TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY” PART 2

YESTERDAY WE BEGAN GLEANING tidbits about Elisha Cook Jr., who is typically recalled as Kasper Gutman’s psychotic sidekick in The Maltese Falcon and as a doomed informer in The Big Sleep. Today in Part 2, Cook begins his movie career in decidedly different roles. And his  real life is considerably more sedate. 

Prior to Portraying Heavies. “At Twentieth Century-Fox,” Wikipedia says, “Cook made an impression as a bespectacled college freshman with radical ideas in the musical comedy Pigskin Parade (1936). He was also featured in the unofficial sequel, Life Begins in College (1937). Cook remained at Fox for two years, and then began freelancing at other studios.”

This and the following image from IMDb.

Wikipedia continues, “He did return to Fox occasionally in prominent roles: as a songwriter in the Alice Faye–Betty Grable musical Tin Pan Alley (1940), and as a mobster disguised as an old woman in the Laurel and Hardy feature A-Haunting We Will Go (1942).”

Cook as songwriter Joe Codd in Tin Pan Alley, 1940. 

Apparently the mobster persona was a good fit with director John Huston selecting Cook as Greenstreet/Gutman’s psychotic sidekick Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon, 1941.

WWII Intervenes. Wikipedia continues, “Cook enlisted in the United States Army in Los Angeles, California, on August 15, 1942. According to his enlistment record he stood 5-feet-5-inches tall and weighed 123 pounds.”

The Big Sleep, 1946. Cook’s appearance in The Big Sleep was a brief one, but a perfect portrayal of Raymond Chandler’s doomed informant Harry Jones. Recently I (re)enjoyed Bogart/Bacall’s The Big Sleep film noir based on Chandler’s book (which has a wonderfully annotated edition discussed variously here at SimanaitisSays.

It’s in Chapter 25 when Marlowe confronts a guy who’s been following him: It might be a cop, Marlowe says, “if a cop had that much time on his hands and wanted to waste it following me around. Or it might be a smoothie in the detective business trying to get a noseful of somebody else’s case in order to chisel a way into it. Or it might be the Bishop of Bermuda disapproving of my night life.” 

What great writing. Might this be the same bishop who kicked a hole in a stained glass window because of that blonde?

About Harry Jones, Marlowe says, “He was a very small man, not more than five feet three and would have weighed as much as a butcher’s thumb. He had tight brilliant eyes that wanted to look hard, and looked as hard as oysters in the half shell.” 

A footnote: “That is, not.”

Harry Jones is about to down a poisoned drink from The Big Sleep’s real baddy Lash Canino. Image from The Annotated Big Sleep. 

The Real Elisha Cook Jr. After a first divorce in 1941, Cook married again in 1943. Wikipedia recounts, “The couple were married for twenty-five years until they formally divorced in Inyo County, California, in February 1968. They remarried on December 30, 1971. Their second marriage lasted another nineteen years until Peggy’s death on December 23, 1990.” Elisha died, age 91, in 1995. 

Director John Huston noted that Cook “lived alone up in the High Sierra, tied flies and caught golden trout between films. When he was wanted in Hollywood, they sent word up to his mountain cabin by courier. He would come down, do a picture, and then withdraw again to his retreat.”

We can assume Cook never looked psychotic in the High Sierra. ds 

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024