Preston Foster

In The Informer (1935), Foster's Dan Gallagher walks into rooms already certain of what will happen in them. He is the commandant, the man Gypo must answer to, and he stands very straight, speaks in whole paragraphs and never once looks as though he might be wrong. Set against Victor McLaglen's slow, frightened face, that is a fair contrast on paper. On screen we found him the weak spot: upright, handsome and dull, a speech in a trench coat.

He came to films in 1929 from Broadway, after vaudeville and opera, and was noticed in 1932 when he carried a stage part to the screen in Two Seconds. The same year gave him Dr Wells in Doctor X and Pete in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, where he is part of the machinery of a fast, angry film and our review did not stop to single him out. That is not a complaint; Paul Muni's face is the film. Then came the long middle, supporting parts and the odd lead through the 1930s and 1940s as soldiers, policemen, detectives and Western men: Annie Oakley (1935) opposite Barbara Stanwyck, My Friend Flicka (1943). The war took him into the Coast Guard, and the 1950s took him to television, where Waterfront (1954–1955) gave him Captain John Herrick and a second audience in living rooms.

It is not hard to see what the casting directors saw. Six foot two, a deep voice, a frame that made uniforms look cut for him. He played heroes and villains with the same steadiness, and was handed the villains often enough that his mother wrote to object. Asked whether he minded, he said: "I don't, but my mother does. Every time I do a part like this, she writes, 'It was a nice picture, Preston, but do you have to play roles like that?'" Steadiness is the word. It is what a studio wants in the fourth name on the poster, and it is what made Gallagher a post rather than a person. Watching The Informer again, we caught ourselves waiting through his scenes for McLaglen to come back, and we do not say that lightly about a Ford film in which almost everyone else is good.

A caveat is owed. Our view rests on one part in a film where the script was against him; we said Dudley Nichols kept saying aloud what the picture had already shown, and Gallagher is where a good deal of the saying happens. His reputation as a solid professional is not one we would argue with. The parts that might change our mind, the villains and the Westerns, we have not yet sat down with. Until we do, he remains for us the man standing very straight in the fog while the film happens to somebody else.