For two decades a B-Western hero, small and cold-eyed, who beat bigger men picture after picture. His best work came when the A-pictures asked him to play the other man: the bully in Of Mice and Men, the henchman in The Big Sleep.
Fi1m perspective
Bob Steele stood five foot five, and for most of the 1930s that was the point of him. In the B-Westerns that made his name he was the small man who went up against the big one and won, week after week. Then Lewis Milestone cast him as Curley in Of Mice and Men (1939) and the same size meant something else. Curley is the ranch bully, and Steele plays him small, mean and frightened of it. The fear is what makes the performance. We disliked him on sight, which is the job, and were slightly ashamed to find we pitied him too, because Steele lets you see a man who knows exactly how he looks standing next to Lon Chaney Jr. and hates it.
He had been in front of a camera since childhood, in shorts directed by his father, Robert N. Bradbury, after a start in vaudeville. The name came in 1927, for starring westerns at FBO, and it carried him through Monogram, Republic and PRC: twenty films as Tucson Smith in the Three Mesquiteers series, a run as Billy the Kid, six pictures with John Wayne. What people noticed was the stare. He could make a man back down without a gun coming out, and he was hired for it again and again.
The material was the trouble. Those westerns were made to a pattern and seldom asked more of him than the pattern needed, and by his own account he did not much mind. His stardom faded in the middle of the 1940s, and the parts that have outlasted it are the ones where he played against everything the audience knew him as. Curley is one. Lash Canino, the henchman in Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946), is the other, in a film where Bogart and Bacall leave little air for anyone else. A henchman who is remembered has usually done his job badly. Canino is remembered anyway, and for the same reason as Curley: the menace has no swagger in it.
After that came character parts and television, more than four hundred films and episodes in all, and a late run as Trooper Duffy in F Troop (1965–1967), a comic western that put him back in front of an audience. He was unsentimental about it. Asked in 1966 about taking bit parts while other actors starved, he said, "Why disintegrate because of pride?" Not many leading men talk like that, and he had been one for longer than most.
Start with Of Mice and Men. It is where the hero of all those westerns turned round and showed what the small man looks like when he is not the hero, and it is still uncomfortable to watch.
Biography
Bob Steele was an American actor who appeared in more than 400 films and television productions, primarily Westerns. Born Robert Adrian Bradbury on 23 January 1907 in Portland, Oregon, he performed in vaudeville as a child with his twin brother Bill before entering films under the direction of their father, Robert N. Bradbury. He adopted the professional name Bob Steele in 1927 and became a leading star of B-Westerns for studios including Monogram, Republic and PRC, appearing in series such as the Three Mesquiteers.
From the mid-1940s he worked mainly as a character actor. Notable credits include Curley in Of Mice and Men (1939), Lash Canino in The Big Sleep (1946), and supporting roles in John Wayne films such as Rio Bravo (1959), The Comancheros (1961) and Rio Lobo (1970). He also appeared in television Westerns and played Trooper Duffy in the comedy series F Troop (1965–1967). Steele died on 21 December 1988.
