A stock company face: stocky, jutting chin, a voice pitched higher than the frame suggests, forever the sergeant, the cop or the man in the next bunk. Joe Sawyer was never the point of a film and was seldom the weak part of one.
Fi1m perspective
In The Long Voyage Home (1940), Ian Hunter's Smitty drinks alone, speaks properly and gives nothing away, and most of the crew are content to leave him to it. Joe Sawyer's Davis is the one who is not. He does very little about it, a look across the bunks, a word to the man beside him, and that is Sawyer's trade in one part. He is the fellow in the crowd who says out loud what the crowd is half thinking, and he says it in a voice higher than his build leads you to expect.
He came up in bit parts in the early 1930s under his own name, Joseph Sauers, mostly as tough men and henchmen. The Informer (1935), in which he plays the gunman Bartly Mulholland, got him noticed and got him a contract at Warner Bros, and from there he worked steadily through the 1930s and 1940s in dozens of films. The parts had names like Spud, Slug and Whitey. He was cast as an Irishman often enough that most viewers took him for one; the surname says German. Ford used him five times, including a bookkeeper in The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Later there was Mike O'Reilly in The Killing (1956) and, for 96 episodes, Sgt. Biff O'Hara in The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin (1954–59), tough and kind-hearted, which is the Sawyer part written out in full.
Our own review of The Informer found more to say about McLaglen's slow, frightened face and Steiner's score than about Sawyer, and that is the character actor's lot: when the job is done properly nobody writes it down. In The Long Voyage Home we did notice him. Davis is the one who decides Smitty's reticence is suspicious, and we were glad of him for it, because a ship full of men who all mind their own business is not a ship anyone would watch for long. It is a small thing, and it is what Ford's company existed to do around Mitchell and Fitzgerald: fill the ship with people who behave like people.
The criticism is the obvious one, and it is fair. A long career was spent almost entirely in parts smaller than the man playing them, and the good notices, for The Petrified Forest (1936) among others, never turned into a lead. He was reliable, and reliable is what studios pay for and critics forget. Do not seek him out; watch for him instead. The next time a stocky sergeant with a jutting chin pipes up from the edge of a Ford frame, you will know who it is.
Biography
Joe Sawyer (born Joseph Sauer or Sauers) was a Canadian film and television actor. He appeared in more than 200 films between 1927 and 1962, often in supporting roles as tough characters such as sergeants, henchmen or lawmen, and was sometimes billed under his birth name.
He trained at the Pasadena Playhouse. Among his film credits are The Informer (1935) as Bartly Mulholland, The Petrified Forest (1936), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Sergeant York (1941), Gilda (1946), The Killing (1956) and How the West Was Won (1962). On television he played Sergeant Biff O'Hara in the series The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin (1954–1959) and appeared in guest roles in western and detective series including Maverick, Sugarfoot, Bat Masterson and Frontier Doctor.
Sawyer was born on 29 August 1906 in Guelph, Ontario, and died on 21 April 1982 in Ashland, Oregon.
