Charles Bickford

Slim, in Of Mice and Men (1939), is the one man on the ranch with any authority, and Bickford plays it as quietness rather than size. Other men there shout, sulk or pick fights; Slim mostly listens, and when he does speak the others stop. He has few scenes and no big ones, and he is the person on that ranch you would trust with anything. Four years later he is Father Peyramale in The Song of Bernadette (1943), a big, tired priest who wants a peasant girl and her visions to go away and cannot make her. Bickford lets us watch him lose that argument with himself one visit at a time, and because the film never sneers at the men who doubt, he is allowed to be a reasonable man who happens to be wrong.

He did not start in supporting parts. Broadway success in the 1920s took him to Hollywood, where Cecil B. DeMille put him in Dynamite (1929) and he was soon playing opposite Greta Garbo. That did not last. He clashed with the men who ran MGM, and by the early 1940s he had moved to character work and stayed there for the rest of his career, in films and later on television. Watching the two pictures we have reviewed, we do not miss the leading man. The gruff voice and the craggy face that the studios thought fit only for fathers and heavies turn out to be exactly what a supporting actor needs: nobody has to explain why people listen to him.

The later parts are variations on the same man. Gallagher in Brute Force (1947), Oliver Niles in A Star Is Born (1954), Major Henry Terrill, the rancher in The Big Country (1958), Ellis Arnesen, the father in Days of Wine and Roses (1962): a prison, a studio, a ranch, a family, and in each of them the one whose word settles things. He was typed, and the run of B-pictures through the 1930s and early 1940s shows what that cost him. He knew it. "I can take one out of ten, and I stick to character roles. I've fought against being typed—not in the parts—in the productions," he said in 1949, and the distinction is a shrewd one. He did not mind playing the same man. He minded playing him in bad films.

What we felt most, watching him, was relief. The Song of Bernadette is sincere, slow and a good hour too long, and every time Peyramale came through a door we sat up, because here at last was someone in the picture prepared to argue. In Of Mice and Men he does less and it matters more; we would put his few minutes as Slim above most of the leading roles of that year. Start there, then the priest. He spent the first part of his career as the hero and the second as the man the hero has to answer to. The second was the better job.