Stuart Erwin played the same slow, decent, slightly baffled American for four decades, and played him so well that the part was named after him. It is a small talent, honestly used, and worth an evening whenever the film around him is any good.
Fi1m perspective
The best joke in Viva Villa (1934) is not Wallace Beery's. It belongs to Stuart Erwin, as Jonny Sykes, the American newspaperman trailing the column, who cables home that Villa has taken a town Villa has not yet attacked. Villa, once the dispatch is read to him, decides he had better take it so the paper is not made a liar. We laughed properly at that, and the joke only works because Erwin plays a man who could plausibly have sent the cable without thinking twice. That was his method for forty years: the fool who has no idea he is the cause of anything.
He came to films in 1928 with Mother Knows Best, and within a few years the studios knew what he was for. The Stu Erwin character, as people came to call it, is the amiable oaf, the yokel, the small-town clerk with a good heart and a slow eye, and he played him through the 1930s and 1940s in whatever shape the picture needed: a hillbilly quarterback in Pigskin Parade (1936), a reporter in Mexico, a townsman in Our Town (1940). When the films tired of him he took the character to television, as the head of the house in The Stu Erwin Show (1950–1955), with his wife June Collyer beside him, and stayed for 130 episodes. He was still doing it for Disney in Son of Flubber (1963), as Coach Wilson.
The virtue is that he never condescended to the fool. "Put me down as a guy who loves being loony," he told an interviewer in the 1930s, and went on to argue that a dumb character takes more thought than a conventional one. You can see the thought. His slowness is timed; the pause before he understands something is a beat longer than you expect and never two, and he lets the other actor have the reaction. The cost is the obvious one. He was typecast, and a man hired to be baffled cannot easily be hired to be anything else. In Our Town he is Howie Newsome, and he is fine, and critics at the time noticed him for playing it straight; our own review did not single him out, because the film's weight sits in the two kitchens and with the narrator, and Erwin is part of the town rather than its point.
Start with Viva Villa, where Ben Hecht gave him one joke worth the whole performance and he had the sense not to sell it. Then Our Town, for the film rather than for him. He was never the reason you chose a picture. He was quite often the reason you did not regret it.
Biography
Stuart Erwin (14 February 1903 – 21 December 1967) was an American actor of stage, film and television. He began acting in college productions in the 1920s, appearing first on stage before making his film debut in Mother Knows Best (1928). He appeared in numerous films, including Viva Villa! (1934) as Jonny Sykes, Palooka (1934) and Pigskin Parade (1936), for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
Erwin transitioned to television in 1950, starring as the lead in the sitcom Trouble with Father, later retitled The Stu Erwin Show, opposite his wife, actress June Collyer. He also provided a voice in Walt Disney's Bambi and appeared in later Disney films such as Son of Flubber (1963). He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and is buried at Chapel of the Pines Crematory.
