A jaw, a set of shoulders and an air of having been wronged. Victor Mature was Hollywood's idea of a biblical hero, and he agreed louder than any critic that he could not act. In The Robe he is better company than the film deserves.
Fi1m perspective
Victor Mature acted with his jaw. He set it, squared the shoulders under it, and let the rest of the picture arrange itself around him. In The Robe (1953) he plays Demetrius that way from first scene to last, a large man with a grievance and the decency not to shout about it, and it is hard not to like him for it. The film around him is a sermon in sandals, the first shot in CinemaScope, and it spends most of its width on people standing in it and talking. Mature at least looks as though he belongs in a frame that size.
He came into films in 1939 under contract to Hal Roach, and One Million B.C. (1940) was his first success. Broadway followed, in Lady in the Dark (1940-41), then the Coast Guard for the war, then a Fox contract and a run of noirs and westerns. Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949) fixed the image for good: the physique, the loincloth, the earnest stare into the middle distance. The Robe and its sequel kept him in a toga through the 1950s. From the mid-1960s the parts thinned, and by After the Fox (1966) he was playing Tony Powell, a version of himself, for laughs.
The complaint against him was that he was a body and not an actor, and he agreed more loudly than anyone. "Hell, I'm no actor and I've got 28 pictures and a scrapbook of reviews to prove it," he liked to say, and the line did him no favours with people paid to take the work seriously. It is also not quite true. Under John Ford in My Darling Clementine (1946) his Doc Holliday is one of the performances critics most often praise, and Henry Hathaway got something similar out of him in Kiss of Death (1947): a quiet, held-in intensity, a man trying to get clear of what he has done. Good directors found that in him. DeMille wanted the shoulders, and got them.
What we can vouch for is Demetrius. We liked him more than the film deserved, and it took us a moment to see why: Richard Burton is clutching his head and Jay Robinson is shrieking at the wide screen, and Mature is simply standing there looking wronged, which in that company counts for a good deal. He is not doing much. He is doing it steadily, and steadiness was what those epics needed and rarely got.
He kept insisting, for years, that he had never been an actor at all. Watch him next to Burton and you can see the point; watch him next to Robinson and you will want to argue. The scrapbook was thicker than he let on.
Biography
Victor Mature was an American stage, film and television actor. Born Victor John Mature on 29 January 1913 in Louisville, Kentucky, he died on 4 August 1999.
He trained at the Pasadena Playhouse and made his film debut in the late 1930s. After serving in the US Coast Guard during the Second World War, Mature appeared in My Darling Clementine (1946) as Doc Holliday, Kiss of Death (1947) as Nick Bianco, Samson and Delilah (1949) as Samson, and The Robe (1953) as Demetrius. He reprised the latter role in Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954) and played Horemheb in The Egyptian (1954). His later credits include After the Fox (1966) and Head (1968).
