A vaudeville child and Sennett comic who spent the sound years as the small, eager face at the edge of large films. When a director cut to him, it was to remind us who would pay for the heroes' decisions. He was used better than he was ever written.
Fi1m perspective
In Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) Eddie Quillan is Tommy Ellison, a seaman taken from a pub with a baby left at home, and Frank Lloyd cuts to him whenever the picture needs us to remember what Bligh's discipline costs. Quillan does not do much with those cuts. He does not have to; he has a face that reads as a boy's from the back of a cinema, and the film uses it as a caption. It is a small part, and it is the one we think of first when his name comes up.
He had been a professional for a long time before that. He came out of a family vaudeville act, The Rising Generation, and was making shorts for Mack Sennett from 1922, close to twenty of them. Show Folks (1928) was his first feature, and Cecil B. DeMille's The Godless Girl (1929) gave him a dramatic part and a contract with Pathé. The sound years put him where he would stay, one rung down from the names on the poster: Mutiny, then two films for John Ford with Henry Fonda, Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940).
What he brought from Sennett was the habit of casing the set before the cameras turned. He told the Los Angeles Times in 1981: "The first thing I’d do when I got on the set was to see where the doors are, where the props are and figure out what I might do in the way of (funny) business." That habit gives his supporting parts a busyness the scripts rarely asked for, and it also marks the limit. His Connie Rivers in The Grapes of Wrath is the son-in-law who has married into the Joads and is not sure he wanted to, and Ford gives him and Dorris Bowdon less than they need. Quillan has nowhere to put the energy and the part fades. We felt sorrier for Connie than the film seems to want us to, because Quillan plays him as a boy who has only just noticed how long the road is.
After 1940 the parts got smaller and the films got cheaper: B-pictures, musical shorts and serials through the 1940s, then Brigadoon (1954) for Vincente Minnelli, then television from the late 1950s, including several turns on Michael Landon's series in the 1970s and 80s. He was never going to lead. He was short, his face was rubber, and the studios had decided early what that meant.
The way to watch him is to stop looking at Gable or Fonda for a moment and see where the film has put the person who will pay for their decisions. It is usually Quillan, and he is usually ready with something to do with his hands.
Biography
Eddie Quillan was an American actor and singer. His career began in vaudeville and silent films in the 1920s and continued into television until the 1980s.
Quillan appeared in films including Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) as Tommy Ellison, Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), and The Grapes of Wrath (1940) as Connie Rivers. In the 1940s he starred in a series of comedy shorts for Columbia Pictures. He made numerous guest appearances on television series such as The Addams Family, Columbo and Little House on the Prairie.
