A soft Southern drawl, a slow blink, and the face of a man who has realised he is the joke. Grady Sutton spent half a century as the foil, most memorably to W.C. Fields, and was rarely on screen long enough to be noticed.
Fi1m perspective
Watch for the pause. Grady Sutton's young men are always a beat behind everyone else, and the good part is the moment the penny drops and the eyes roll upward as if asking heaven for a second opinion. He played the same fellow for fifty years: the dim country boy, the flustered suitor, the man in a good suit who has no idea what is going on. The drawl was soft and the alarm was total.
He arrived in California in 1924 and was in silents the next year, an uncredited student in The Freshman (1925) among them. Sound suited him, because the voice was the instrument: Hal Roach's college shorts, the Boy Friends series, then the run of supporting parts that fixed the type. Four films opposite W.C. Fields between 1933 and 1940 are the heart of it, from The Pharmacist (1933) to The Bank Dick (1940), where he plays Og Oggilby, the prospective son-in-law, and does the job a foil is for: stands still, takes it, and lets Fields be Fields.
We have reviewed one of his films, Alice Adams (1935), and gave it 79, and our review does not mention him. That is the career in a sentence. He was seldom mentioned anywhere, and he was in everything. He plays Frank Dowling, Katharine Hepburn's awkward dancing partner, and we found ourselves watching him rather than her for a minute or so, which in a Hepburn film is not nothing. He does the whole flustered turn, the drawl, the panic behind the manners, and never once asks for the laugh. He worked with her again in Stage Door (1937), as Butch.
The limitation is the obvious one. The studios typecast him, as the bumpkin and as the effeminate stooge, and the films rarely gave him more than a scene to do it in. By the 1950s and 1960s the parts had shrunk to uncredited faces in the crowd, an Ascot extra in My Fair Lady (1964), guest spots on television, and his last film was Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979), as the president of the school board. Nobody built a picture around him. Nobody was going to.
He called Hepburn and Fields "two of the nicest people I ever met", which is the sort of thing a man says after fifty years of standing next to the star. Start with The Bank Dick. Then put on almost any American comedy of the 1930s and wait; he is usually there, slightly to the left, about to realise something.
Biography
Grady Sutton, also credited as Grady Harwell Sutton, was an American character actor. Born on 5 April 1906 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, he arrived in California in 1924 and made his film debut in The Mad Whirl (1925). He began in silent films and continued in sound pictures, often in college-themed shorts such as The Boy Friends series before moving into supporting roles.
Sutton appeared in more than 180 films and numerous television episodes between 1925 and 1979. He played Frank Dowling in Alice Adams (1935) and was a recurring foil to W. C. Fields in The Pharmacist (1933), Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935), You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1939) and The Bank Dick (1940). Other credits include My Man Godfrey (1936), Stage Door (1937), Anchors Aweigh (1945), White Christmas (1954), A Star Is Born (1954), My Fair Lady (1964), Batman (1966) and Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979). He died on 17 September 1995 in Woodland Hills, California.
