Richard Arlen flew in the first war before he flew for the camera, and it shows. He was a quiet, level actor who asked nothing of the lens and was at his best beside something louder: Clara Bow, Charles Laughton, an aeroplane.
Fi1m perspective
In Wings (1927), two new fliers share a tent at training camp. Charles Rogers plays Jack for the camera, all eagerness and eyebrows, and Richard Arlen, as David Armstrong, mostly sits. He listens, he waits, he lets the other man have the scene. We found ourselves watching him rather than Rogers whenever the two were in the frame, and it took us a while to see why: he was the one man in the picture who was not asking the lens for anything. It is not a large gift, but it is a real one, and the silent screen did not have many actors who knew what to do with it.
Arlen had flown before he acted, with the Royal Flying Corps in the first war, which is the one line of biography that belongs here: he knew how a man sits in a cockpit, and William A. Wellman, who had also flown, knew it too. They made four films together, Beggars of Life (1928) among them, and Wellman got the best out of Arlen by putting his stillness next to something moving. When sound came he was at Paramount, as Steve in The Virginian (1929) alongside Gary Cooper, and as Edward Parker in Island of Lost Souls (1932), where his job is to stand in front of Charles Laughton and take it in, which is exactly the job he was built for.
Then the pictures got smaller. From the early 1930s he freelanced, and between 1939 and 1941 he made fourteen action films with Andy Devine, cheap and quick, the kind of thing a studio put out to fill the bottom of the bill. He went back to the air as a flight instructor in the second war, and afterwards worked in westerns and supporting parts into the 1960s, with television in between; Bacon in Warlock (1959) is a fair sample. We have not seen enough of the later work to judge it and will not pretend to. The general complaint is that it never asked him to be more than competent, and competent is what he was.
The flaw is the other side of the virtue. An actor who does not push can read as an actor who is not there, and when the picture around him is quiet too, there is a risk that nothing much happens on the screen. He needed noise: Bow, Laughton, a real sky full of real aeroplanes. Start with Wings, and for once watch the tent rather than the dogfights. Then Island of Lost Souls, where the noise is Laughton and Arlen's job is to keep his face still while everything behind it changes.
Biography
Richard Arlen (born Sylvanus Richard Mattimore, also credited as Van Mattimore or Dick Arlen) was an American film and television actor. He served as a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War and later as a flight instructor with the United States Army Air Forces in the Second World War.
Arlen is best known for playing David Armstrong in the silent film Wings (1927), which won the first Academy Award for Best Picture. He appeared in other films including Island of Lost Souls (1932) and Beggars of Life (1928), and later worked in television series such as Perry Mason and Petticoat Junction. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
