Edgar Buchanan mumbled through his moustache in more than a hundred films and never once pretended to be anyone else. The sly, tired, decent rustic was his only part, and in the right Western it was the one worth watching.
Fi1m perspective
In The Talk of the Town (1942), the fugitive Dilg needs a lawyer, and the one he gets is Edgar Buchanan's Sam Yates, a man who appears to be addressing his own moustache and who nonetheless lands every line he is given. That is Buchanan in one part. He looks as if he has wandered in from the feed store, he sounds like gravel in a bucket, and he is the one man at the table you would trust with your money.
He came to it late. He was a dentist until he was thirty-six, joined the Pasadena Playhouse in 1939, was signed by a studio and made his debut the same year in My Son Is Guilty. From there he did what studio character men did, which was work: more than a hundred films through the 1950s and 1960s, many of them Westerns, thirteen of them with Glenn Ford. Then television, where Petticoat Junction (1963–1970) kept him occupied as Uncle Joe Carson for all 222 episodes. He retired after Benji (1974).
He never claimed to be doing anything but turning up. "I've always played myself, whether doing a dramatic or comedy role," he said in 1972. The complaint that follows from that, and it followed him for forty years, is that he played the same rustic rogue in everything, and it is true. It is also the reason he was worth casting. In Shane (1953) the farmers are mostly hats; Buchanan's Fred Lewis, who would rather sell up and go, is one of the two drawn with any care, and we found ourselves more on his side than we expected to be, because a worn-out man saying he has had enough sounds like plain sense when Buchanan says it.
Directors valued that understated delivery, and George Stevens, who made both films we have reviewed, got the most from it by letting him talk in a parlour full of better-dressed people and trusting us to notice who was making sense. He liked Penny Serenade (1941) best himself, and there is a late Western part as Judge Tolliver in Ride the High Country (1962) that admirers of his still mention. We would start with The Talk of the Town, where he has the most to say, and Shane, where he has the least and makes it count. A hundred films of the same man sounds like a limitation. It was a career, and a better one than most of the hats managed.
Biography
Edgar Buchanan, also credited as William Edgar Buchanan II, was an American actor. Born in Humansville, Missouri, he trained as a dentist, graduating from North Pacific College School of Dentistry in Portland, Oregon, and practised in Oregon and California before turning to acting in the late 1930s.
He made his film debut in 1939 and appeared in more than 100 films, including The Talk of the Town (1942) as Sam Yates, Shane (1953) as Fred Lewis, Ride the High Country (1962) as Judge Tolliver and McLintock! (1963) as Bunny Dull. On television he played recurring roles in series such as The Andy Griffith Show (1960) and Bonanza (1959), and is best known as Uncle Joe Carson in Petticoat Junction, Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies.
Buchanan died in Palm Desert, California, in 1979.
