Background to Danger


2:45 pm - 4:15 pm, Wednesday, November 12 on Turner Classic Movies ()

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About this Broadcast
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Barton, an American agent working undercover in neutral Turkey during WWII, receives documents of plans for a supposed Russian invasion. Soon Barton and two Russian siblings must combat a ruthless Nazi agent. Based on the novel by Eric Ambler.

1943 English
Drama Espionage War

Cast & Crew
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George Raft (Actor) .. Joe Barton
Brenda Marshall (Actor) .. Tamara Zaleshoff
Sydney Greenstreet (Actor) .. Colonel Robinson
Peter Lorre (Actor) .. Nikolai Zaleshoff
Osa Massen (Actor) .. Ana Remzi
Turhan Bey (Actor) .. Hassan
Willard Robertson (Actor) .. McNamara
Kurt Katch (Actor) .. Mailler
Daniel Ocko (Actor) .. Rashenko
Pedro De Cordoba (Actor) .. Old Turk
Frank Puglia (Actor) .. Syrian Vendor
Steven Geray (Actor) .. Raeder
Curt Furberg (Actor) .. Von Popen
Frank Reicher (Actor) .. Rudick
Jean De Briac (Actor) .. Levantine Porter
Georges Renavent (Actor) .. Customs Official with Ana
Paul Porcasi (Actor) .. Customs Official with Joe
Demetrius Emanuel (Actor) .. Turkish Official
Michael Mark (Actor) .. Hotel Night Clerk
Kurt Kreuger (Actor) .. Chauffeur
Ray Miller (Actor) .. Chauffeur
William Yetter (Actor) .. Schneider - Mailler's Henchman
Otto Reichow (Actor) .. Mailler's Henchman
Charles Irwin (Actor) .. Hotchkins - English Traveler
Antonio Samaniego (Actor) .. Policeman
Irene Seidner (Actor) .. German Mother
Lisa Golm (Actor) .. German Daughter
Manart Kippen (Actor) .. Ivan
William Edmunds (Actor) .. Waiter with Information
William von Brincken (Actor) .. German Official
Nestor Paiva (Actor) .. Koylan
Charles La Torre (Actor) .. Moustaffa - Typesetter
Lou Marcelle (Actor) .. Commentator
Dave Kashner (Actor) .. Minor Role

More Information
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Did You Know..
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George Raft (Actor) .. Joe Barton
Born: September 26, 1895
Died: November 24, 1980
Trivia: Raft spent his childhood in the tough Hell's Kitchen area of New York, then left home at 13. He went on to be a prizefighter, ballroom dancer, and taxi-driver, meanwhile maintaining close contacts with New York's gangster underworld. He eventually made it to Broadway, then went to Hollywood in the late '20s. At first considered a Valentino-like romantic lead, Raft soon discovered his forte in gangster roles. He was the actor most responsible for creating the '30s cinema image of gangster-as-hero, particularly after his portrayal of coin-flipping Guido Rinaldo in Scarface (1932). He was highly successful for almost two decades, but then bad casting diminished his popularity. By the early '50s he was acting in European films in a vain attempt to regain critical respect, but he was unsuccessful. He starred in the mid-'50s TV series "I Am the Law," a failure that seriously hurt his financial status. In 1959 a Havana casino he owned was closed by the Castro government, further damaging his revenues; meanwhile, he owed a great deal to the U.S. government in back taxes. In the mid '60s he was denied entry into England (where he managed a high-class gambling club) due to his underworld associations. Most of his film appearances after 1960 were cameos. He was portrayed by Ray Danton in the biopic The George Raft Story (1961).
Brenda Marshall (Actor) .. Tamara Zaleshoff
Born: September 29, 1915
Died: July 30, 1992
Trivia: Brenda Marshall wanted to be a film actress, all right; it's just that she didn't want to be Brenda Marshall. Throughout her years in Hollywood, she insisted that her friends and co-workers address her not by her studio-fabricated cognomen, but by her given name of Ardis Anderson Gaines. A Warner Bros. contractee of the early 1940s, Anderson/Marshall did her best work opposite Errol Flynn in The Sea Hawk (1940) and Footsteps in the Dark (1941). From 1941 through 1973, Brenda Marshall was married to actor William Holden, a curious union that evidently soured early on (Holden's friends blamed Marshall, and vice versa), and was distinguished by extended separations and numerous extracurricular romances.
Sydney Greenstreet (Actor) .. Colonel Robinson
Born: December 27, 1879
Died: January 18, 1954
Birthplace: Sandwich, Kent, England
Trivia: Sydney Greenstreet ranked among Hollywood's consummate character actors, a classic rogue whose villainous turns in motion pictures like Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon remain among the most memorable and enigmatic depictions of evil ever captured on film. Born December 27, 1879, in Sandwich, England, Greenstreet's initial ambition was to make his fortune as a tea planter, and toward that aim he moved to Sri Lanka at the age of 18. A drought left him penniless, however, and he soon returned to England, where he worked a variety of odd jobs while studying acting in the evening under Ben Greet. In 1902, he made his theatrical debut portraying a murderer in Sherlock Holmes, and two years later he traveled with Greet to the United States. After making his Broadway debut in Everyman, Greenstreet's American residency continued for the rest of his life.Greenstreet remained exclusively a theatrical performer for over three decades. He shifted easily from musical comedy to Shakespeare, and in 1933 he joined the Lunts in Idiot's Delight, performing with their Theatre Guild for the duration of the decade. While appearing in Los Angeles in a touring production of There Shall Be No Night in 1940, Greenstreet met John Huston, who requested he play the ruthless Guttman in his 1941 film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. A heavy, imposing man, Greenstreet was perfectly cast as the massive yet strangely effete Guttman, a dignified dandy who was in truth the very essence of malevolence. Making his film debut at the age of 62, he appeared alongside the two actors with whom he would be forever connected, star Humphrey Bogart and fellow character actor Peter Lorre. The acclaim afforded Greenstreet for The Maltese Falcon earned him a long-term contract with Warner Bros., where, after appearing in They Died With Their Boots On, he again played opposite Bogart in 1942's Across the Pacific. In 1942, he appeared briefly in Casablanca, another reunion with Bogart as well as Lorre. When Greenstreet and Lorre again reteamed in 1943's Background in Danger, their fate was sealed, and they appeared together numerous other times including 1944's Passage to Marseilles (again with Bogart), The Mask of Dimitrios, The Conspirators, and Hollywood Canteen, in which they portrayed themselves. Yearning to play comedy, Greenstreet got his wish in 1945's Pillow to Post, which cast him alongside Ida Lupino. He also appeared opposite Bogart again in the drama Conflict and with Barbara Stanwyck in Christmas in Connecticut. In 1952, he announced his retirement, and died two years later on January 18, 1954.
Peter Lorre (Actor) .. Nikolai Zaleshoff
Born: June 26, 1904
Died: March 23, 1964
Birthplace: Rozsahegy, Austria-Hungary
Trivia: With the possible exception of Edward G. Robinson, no actor has so often been the target of impressionists as the inimitable, Hungarian-born Peter Lorre. Leaving his family home at the age of 17, Lorre sought out work as an actor, toiling as a bank clerk during down periods. He went the starving-artist route in Switzerland and Austria before settling in Germany, where he became a favorite of playwright Bertolt Brecht. For most of his first seven years as a professional actor, Lorre employed his familiar repertoire of wide eyes, toothy grin, and nasal voice to invoke laughs rather than shudders. In fact, he was appearing in a stage comedy at the same time that he was filming his breakthrough picture M (1931), in which he was cast as a sniveling child murderer. When Hitler ascended to power in 1933, Lorre fled to Paris, and then to London, where he appeared in his first English-language film, Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). Although the monolingual Lorre had to learn his lines phonetically for Hitchcock, he picked up English fairly rapidly, and, by 1935, was well equipped both vocally and psychologically to take on Hollywood. On the strength of M, Lorre was initially cast in roles calling for varying degrees of madness, such as the love-obsessed surgeon in Mad Love (1935) and the existentialist killer in Crime and Punishment (1935). Signed to a 20th Century Fox contract in 1936, Lorre asked for and received a chance to play a good guy for a change. He starred in eight installments of the Mr. Moto series, playing an ever-polite (albeit well versed in karate) Japanese detective. When the series folded in 1939, Lorre freelanced in villainous roles at several studios. While under contract to Warner Bros., Lorre played effeminate thief Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon (1941), launching an unofficial series of Warner films in which Lorre was teamed with his Falcon co-star Sidney Greenstreet. During this period, Lorre's co-workers either adored or reviled him for his wicked sense of humor and bizarre on-set behavior. As far as director Jean Negulesco was concerned, Lorre was the finest actor in Hollywood; Negulesco fought bitterly with the studio brass for permission to cast Lorre as the sympathetic leading man in The Mask of Dimitrios (1946), in which the diminutive actor gave one of his finest and subtlest performances. In 1951, Lorre briefly returned to Germany, where he directed and starred in the intriguing (if not wholly successful) postwar psychological drama The Lost One. The '50s were a particularly busy time for Lorre; he performed frequently on such live television anthologies as Climax; guested on comedy and variety shows; and continued to appear in character parts in films. He remained a popular commodity into the '60s, especially after co-starring with the likes of Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, and Basil Rathbone in a series of tongue-in-cheek Edgar Allan Poe adaptations for filmmaker Roger Corman. Lorre's last film, completed just a few months before his fatal heart attack in 1964, was Jerry Lewis' The Patsy, in which, ironically, the dourly demonic Lorre played a director of comedy films.
Osa Massen (Actor) .. Ana Remzi
Born: January 13, 1914
Died: January 02, 2006
Trivia: Although never a major star, Danish-born actress Osa Massen made an impact in such 1940s melodramas as A Woman's Face (1941), in which she engages in an outright catfight with heroine Joan Crawford, and the noir thriller Deadline at Dawn (1946), as a woman with something to hide. Trained as a newspaper photographer, Massen (born Aase Madsen) was persuaded by Danish director Alice O'Fredericks to make her acting debut in Kidnapped (1935), a comedy starring Denmark's answer to Shirley Temple, and although Osa had designs on a career as a film cutter, she agreed to appear in a second Danish film, the seemingly lost Bag Københavns Kulisser (1935). A screen test for 20th Century Fox led to a Hollywood contract. Director Edward H. Griffith cast her as a Dutch-Polynesian femme fatale in Honeymoon in Bali (1939), which several reviewers thought she stole outright from nominal stars Madeleine Carroll and Fred MacMurray. Switching to Warner Bros., Massen appeared mainly in potboilers, her best assignment coming on loan to MGM in the aforementioned A Woman's Face, a remake of a Swedish melodrama that had starred Ingrid Bergman, with whom Massen was often compared. Playing leading roles in low-budget productions and supporting parts in Grade-A films, Osa, as many critics pointed out, always made her moments count. She scored as a mystery woman murdered on a train in Background to Danger (1943), a rather fanciful espionage thriller starring George Raft. Deadline at Dawn (1946), in which she played Paul Lukas' daughter, was one of the first true film noirs and Massen was again singled out by several critics. After being continually confused with Ona Munson and Hungarian import Ilona Massey, co-star Gene Raymond persuaded her to change her name to Stefanie Paull for Million Dollar Weekend (1948). She was back to Osa Massen in Rocketship X-M (1950), an early sci-fi thriller and perhaps her best-remembered film. Divorced from Alan Hersholt, the son of character actor Jean Hersholt, Massen was widowed by her second husband, a Beverly Hills physician, in 1953. At that point, she concentrated on television guest roles. After appearing in shows ranging from Perry Mason to Wagon Train, Massen made her final screen appearance in Outcasts of the City (1958), a love story set in Germany and one of the last films released by Republic Pictures. Divorced from her third husband, a Hollywood dentist, she faded completely from public view.
Turhan Bey (Actor) .. Hassan
Born: March 30, 1922
Died: September 30, 2012
Birthplace: Vienna
Trivia: Handsome, dapper leading man Bey was born Turhan Selahattin Sahultavy to a Turkish father and Czech mother in Vienna. He came to the U.S. in the '30s and studied acting at Ben Bard's School of Dramatic Arts and at the Pasadena Playhouse. With available actors depleted by World War Two, he began finding work in Hollywood in 1941, usually in exotic Arabian Nights-type films in which he co-starred with Maria Montez, Jon Hall, and Sabu. When that genre dried up in the late '40s, so did Bey's career, a problem exacerbated when he was called up for an extended term of military service; after 1950 he appeared in only one film, Prisoners of the Casbah (1953), and produced another, Stolen Identity (1953). Bey did become a well-respected photographer in his native Vienna, and he directed plays at the Marionette Theater in Salzburg.
Willard Robertson (Actor) .. McNamara
Born: January 01, 1886
Died: April 05, 1948
Trivia: A New Year's baby, actor Willard Robertson grew up in Texas, where he became a successful lawyer. Reportedly he was offered an opportunity to become a federal judge, but he turned it down because of a sudden interest in acting. Since he looked the part of a prosperous attorney, however, Robertson frequently found himself playing a member of the very profession he'd left behind. The actor also showed up as sheriffs, mayors, city councilmen and stern father figures during his quarter-centry film career. While Preston Sturges buffs pinpoint Robertson's flamboyant defense attorney in Remember the Night? (1940) as his best performance, the actor is equally fondly recalled for his portrayal of Jackie Cooper's outwardly stern, inwardly loving father in Skippy (1931) and Sooky (1931). By the mid '40s, Willard Robertson's roles were usually of one scene's duration or less, but he still carried plenty of authority, notably as the sheriff in the grim The Ox-Bow Incident (1943); Robertson's icy remonstration to a lynch mob, "The Lord better have mercy on you...you won't get it from me," still chills the blood after fifty years.
Kurt Katch (Actor) .. Mailler
Born: January 28, 1896
Died: August 14, 1958
Trivia: Foreboding, shaven-headed Polish actor Kurt Katch studied acting and directing with the fabled Viennese impresario Max Reinhardt. Katch went on to organize Berlin's Kulturbund Deutschen Juden Theater and a Yiddish-speaking troupe in Warsaw. When Hitler rose to power, the Jewish Katch saw the handwriting on the wall and came to the U.S. in 1937. He established himself as a movie villain in the 1940s, most often cast as a smirking, monocled Nazi. In films until 1958's The Young Lions, Kurt Katch is best remembered by boys of all ages as the unspeakable Hulagu Khan in that ultimate escapist adventure yarn Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944).
Daniel Ocko (Actor) .. Rashenko
Pedro De Cordoba (Actor) .. Old Turk
Born: September 28, 1881
Frank Puglia (Actor) .. Syrian Vendor
Born: January 01, 1892
Died: October 25, 1975
Trivia: Sicilian actor Frank Puglia started his career with a travelling operetta company at age 13. He and his family moved to the US in 1907, where he worked in a laundry until he hooked up with an Italian-language theatrical troupe based in New York. In 1921, Puglia was appearing as Pierre Frochard in a revival of the old theatrical warhorse The Two Orphans when he was spotted by film director D.W. Griffith. Puglia was hired to repeat his role for Griffith's film version of the play, retitled Orphans of the Storm; while Pierre Frochard was slated to die at the end of the film, preview-audience reaction to the death was so negative that Griffith called Puglia back to reshoot his final scenes, allowing him to survive for the fade-out. For the rest of his long film career, Puglia essayed a wide variety of ethnic supporting parts, portraying priests, musicians, diplomats and street peddlers. In 1942's Casablanca, Puglia has a memorable bit as a Morroccan rug merchant who automatically marks down his prices to any friends of Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart). Frank Puglia played a larger and less likable role as a treacherous minion to sultan Kurt Katch in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944); when the film was remade as Sword of Ali Baba in 1965, so much stock footage from the 1944 film was utilized that Puglia was hired to replay his original part.
Steven Geray (Actor) .. Raeder
Born: November 10, 1899
Died: December 26, 1973
Trivia: Czech character actor Steven Geray was for many years a member in good standing of the Hungarian National Theater. He launched his English-speaking film career in Britain in 1935, then moved to the U.S. in 1941. His roles ranged from sinister to sympathetic, from "A" productions like Gilda (1946) to potboilers like El Paso (1949). He flourished during the war years, enjoying top billing in the moody little romantic melodrama So Dark the Night (1946), and also attracting critical praise for his portrayal of Dirk Stroeve in The Moon and Sixpence (1942). Many of Geray's film appearances in the 1950s were unbilled; when he was given screen credit, it was usually as "Steve Geray." Geray's busy career in film and television continued into the 1960s. Steven Geray worked until he had obviously depleted his physical strength; it was somewhat sad to watch the ailing Geray struggle through the western horror pic Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (1965).
Curt Furberg (Actor) .. Von Popen
Frank Reicher (Actor) .. Rudick
Born: December 02, 1875
Died: January 19, 1965
Trivia: Launching his theatrical career in his native Germany, actor/director Frank Reicher worked in London before coming to the US in 1899. His entree into the movies was as co-director of the 1915 production The Clue; he continued to direct in Hollywood before returning to the stage in 1921. At the dawn of the talkie era, Reicher was brought back to California to direct German-language versions of American films. For his acting bow before the microphones, Reicher was cast in the title role of Napoleon's Barber (1928) a Fox Movietone two-reeler which represented the first talkie for director John Ford. Reicher specialized at this time in humorless, wizened authority figures: college professors, doctors, scientists, cabinet ministers. In 1933 he was cast as Captain Engelhorn in the classic adventure fantasy King Kong; director Ernest Schoedsack later characterized Reicher as "the best actor we had" in a cast which included Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot and Fay Wray. He repeated the Engelhorn role, with a modicum of uncharacteristic humor added, in Son of Kong (1933). The remainder of Reicher's film career was devoted to brief character roles, often as murder victims. He was killed off at least twice by Boris Karloff (Invisible Ray [1936] and House of Frankenstein [1944]), and was strangled by Lon Chaney Jr. at the very beginning of The Mummy's Ghost (1944) (When Chaney inadvertently cut off his air during the feigned strangulation, Reicher subjected the star to a scorching reprimand, reducing Chaney to a quivering mass of meek apologies). During the war, Reicher's Teutonic name and bearing came in handy for the many anti-Nazi films of the era, notably To Be or Not to Be (1942) and Mission to Moscow (1944). In 1946, Reicher had one of his largest parts in years as the general factotum to hypnotist Edmund Lowe in The Strange Mr. Gregory (1946); that the part may have been written for the venerable actor is evidenced by the fact that his character name was Reicher. Frank Reicher retired in 1951; he died fourteen years later, at age 90.
Jean De Briac (Actor) .. Levantine Porter
Born: August 15, 1891
Died: October 18, 1970
Trivia: A debonair, mustachioed supporting actor from France, Jean De Briac played prominent roles in the silent era -- Fred Thomson's fisherman brother in Mary Pickford's The Love Light (1921), the notorious "The Knifer" in Clara Bow's Parisian Love (1925), the stage director in Greta Garbo's The Divine Woman (1928) -- but mainly bit parts thereafter. De Briac, whose career continued well into the '50s, even turned up in a 1949 episode of television's The Lone Ranger.
Georges Renavent (Actor) .. Customs Official with Ana
Born: April 23, 1894
Died: January 02, 1969
Trivia: French stage actor Georges Renavent made his first American film appearance in 1915's Seven Sisters. Fourteen years later, Renavent made an impressive talking-picture bow as the villainous Kinkajou in RKO's musical spectacular Rio Rita. He spent the rest of his Hollywood career playing roles of varying sizes, usually foreign ambassadors and international gigolos. An apparent favorite of producer Hal Roach, Renavent enjoyed a lengthy role in Roach's Turnabout (1940) as Mr. Ram, the ancient Indian god who performs a gender-switch on stars John Hubbard and Carole Landis. Sporadically during the 1930s and 1940s, Renavent managed his own touring Grand Guignol theatrical troupe. Georges Renavent was married to actress Selena Royle.
Paul Porcasi (Actor) .. Customs Official with Joe
Born: January 01, 1880
Died: August 08, 1946
Trivia: A former opera singer in his native Sicily, bull-necked, waxed-moustached character actor Paul Porcasi made his screen bow in 1917's Fall of the Romanoffs. Porcasi flourished in the talkie era, playing innumerable speakeasy owners, impresarios, chefs, and restaurateurs. The nationalities of his screen characters ranged from Italian to French to Greek to Spanish; most often, however, he played Greeks with such onomatopoeic monikers as Papapopolous. Porcasi's best-remembered film roles include Nick the Greek in Broadway (1929), the obsequious garment merchant in Devil in the Deep (1932), dour border guard Gonzalez in Eddie Cantor's The Kid From Spain (1932), and the apoplectic apple vendor ("Hey! You steal-a!") in King Kong (1933). Paul Porcasi was also starred in the first three-strip Technicolor short subject, La Cucaracha (1934), wherein his face turned a deep crimson after he ingested one too many hot chili peppers.
Demetrius Emanuel (Actor) .. Turkish Official
Michael Mark (Actor) .. Hotel Night Clerk
Born: March 15, 1889
Died: February 03, 1975
Trivia: Russian-born Michael Mark spent his first two decades in America as a vaudeville and legit-theatre director/producer. In films from 1924, Mark played featured roles until his retirement 25 years later. A fixture of Universal's horror-film output, he is best remembered as the father of the little drowned girl in the original Frankenstein (1931). During the late 1940s, Michael Mark was a semi-regular in Monogram's "Joe Palooka" series, playing the title character's father.
Kurt Kreuger (Actor) .. Chauffeur
Born: July 23, 1916
Died: July 12, 2006
Trivia: Raised in Switzerland, Kreuger attended college in London and New York. He began appearing in films in 1943; thanks to his classic Aryan looks and Continental accent he was frequently cast as young Nazis, though he occasionally got romantic leads. Rugged and blond, he became very popular with women, and for a time he was 20th Century-Fox's #3 male pinup. He might have become a star, but he was never cast in suitably central roles. Kreuger became an American citizen in 1944. During the '50s he appeared primarily in European films, then later returned to Hollywood in supporting roles. He last appeared onscreen in 1967, but went on to occasional work on TV. He became a millionaire in Hollywood real estate transactions.
Ray Miller (Actor) .. Chauffeur
William Yetter (Actor) .. Schneider - Mailler's Henchman
Otto Reichow (Actor) .. Mailler's Henchman
Born: January 01, 1904
Trivia: German actor Otto Reichow launched his stage and film career in Berlin in 1928. In the early talkie era, Reichow was featured in Fritz Lang's Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932). When Hitler came to power, Reichow and his family were consigned to the führer's blacklist due to their outspoken opposition of Nazism. After his brother was killed by Hitler's minions, Reichow relocated to France in 1936, where he appeared in Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937). The actor continued to express his hatred of Hitler through his brutal portrayals of Nazis in Hollywood films of the 1940s. In addition to his mainstream film work, Otto Reichow was featured in several propaganda films for the U.S. Army Air Force motion picture unit.
Charles Irwin (Actor) .. Hotchkins - English Traveler
Born: January 01, 1888
Died: January 12, 1969
Trivia: Before turning to films, Irish-born Charles Irwin enjoyed a long career as a music hall and vaudeville monologist. Irwin's talking-picture debut was the appropriately titled 1928 short subject The Debonair Humorist. Two years later, he proved a dapper and agreeable master of ceremonies for Universal's big-budget Technicolor musical The King of Jazz (1930). As the 1930s wore on, his roles diminished into bits and walk-ons; he fleetingly showed up as a green-tinted "Ozite" in The Wizard of Oz (1939) and appeared as the British racetrack announcer describing the progress of "Little Johnny Jones" in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). Before his retirement in 1959, Charles Irwin essayed such one-scene assignments as territorial representative Andy Barnes in the first few Bomba the Jungle Boy pictures and Captain Orton in The King and I (1956).
Antonio Samaniego (Actor) .. Policeman
Irene Seidner (Actor) .. German Mother
Born: January 01, 1880
Died: January 01, 1959
Lisa Golm (Actor) .. German Daughter
Born: April 10, 1891
Died: January 01, 1964
Manart Kippen (Actor) .. Ivan
Born: March 20, 1892
Died: October 12, 1947
Trivia: A distinguished stage and radio actor and a former programming director of radio station WMCA in New York City, Manart Kippen played Soviet Premier Josef Stalin in the later vilified Mission to Moscow (1943). Specializing in playing medical doctors, as in Three Russian Girls (1944) and Mildred Pierce (1945), Kippen's career was cut short by a fatal car accident outside Claremont, OK .
William Edmunds (Actor) .. Waiter with Information
Born: January 01, 1885
Died: January 01, 1981
Trivia: A slight man with an air of perpetual anxiety, character actor William Edmunds was most often cast in stereotypical Spanish and Italian roles. Edmunds' first film, the Bob Hope 2-reeler Going Spanish (1934), was lensed in New York; he didn't settle down in Hollywood until 1938. He played bits in films like Idiot's Delight (1939) and Casablanca (1942), and larger roles in such fare as House of Frankenstein (1944, as gypsy leader Fejos), Bob Hope's Where There's Life (1947, as King Hubertus II) and Double Dynamite (1951, as waiter Groucho Marx's long-suffering boss). His many short subject appearances include a few stints as Robert "Mickey" Blake's father in the Our Gang series. William Edmunds was afforded top billing in the 1951 TV situation comedy Actors' Hotel.
William von Brincken (Actor) .. German Official
Born: May 27, 1891
Died: January 18, 1946
Trivia: A former captain of the Life Hussars of the King of Saxony, William von Brincken came to America as a military attaché at the German embassy in Washington. Stranded in the U.S. after WWI, von Brincken moved to Hollywood, where he joined the so-called Elite Guard, a group of former mittel-European officers brought together for film work by director Erich von Stroheim. As a recognized military expert, he served as a technical advisor for such films as Flesh and the Devil (1927) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). His film-acting career began in von Stroheim's Queen Kelly (1929); he went on to play such roles as Von Richtofen in Hell's Angels (1930), and during WWII was one of several German expatriates called upon to play Nazis. Whenever it seemed politically expedient to do so, William von Brincken acted under such Anglicized stage names as Roger Beckwith and William Vaughan.
Nestor Paiva (Actor) .. Koylan
Born: June 30, 1905
Died: September 09, 1966
Trivia: Nestor Paiva had the indeterminate ethnic features and gift for dialects that enabled him to play virtually every nationality. Though frequently pegged as a Spaniard, a Greek, a Portuguese, an Italian, an Arab, an even (on radio, at least) an African-American, Paiva was actually born in Fresno, California. A holder of an A.B. degree from the University of California at Berkeley, Paiva developed an interest in acting while performing in college theatricals. Proficient in several languages, Paiva made his stage bow at Berkeley's Greek Theatre in a production of Antigone. His subsequent professional stage career was confined to California; he caught the eye of the studios by appearing in a long-running Los Angeles production of The Drunkard, which costarred another future film player of note, Henry Brandon. He remained with The Drunkard from 1934 to 1945, finally dropping out when his workload in films became too heavy. Paiva appeared in roles both large and small in so many films that it's hard to find a representative appearance. Fans of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby can take in a good cross-section of Paiva's work via his appearances in Road to Morocco (1942), Road to Utopia (1945) and Road to Rio (1947); he has a bit as a street peddler in Morocco, is desperado McGurk in Utopia, and plays the Brazilian theatre manager who isn't fooled by the Wiere Brothers' attempt to pass themselves off as Americans ("You're een the groove, Jackson") in Rio. During his busiest period, 1945 through 1948, Paiva appeared in no fewer than 117 films. The familiar canteloupe-shaped mug and hyperactive eyebrows of Nestor Paiva graced many a film and TV program until his death in 1966; his final film, the William Castle comedy The Spirit is Willing (1967), was released posthumously.
Charles La Torre (Actor) .. Moustaffa - Typesetter
Born: May 15, 1894
Died: February 20, 1990
Trivia: A graduate of Columbia University and a veteran stage actor, New York-born Charles La Torre played the Italian military officer Tonelli in Casablanca (1942). That was perhaps a highlight in a screen career spent portraying every ethnic type possible, from a Portuguese café proprietor in The Hairy Ape (1944) to an Arabic villain, Abdullah, in Bomba and the Hidden City (1950). This Charles La Torre, who appeared in hundreds of feature films, comedy shorts, and television shows from 1941-1966, should not be confused with Charles Latorre, an African-American player who appeared in several Oscar Micheaux films of the late '30s.
Lou Marcelle (Actor) .. Commentator
Dave Kashner (Actor) .. Minor Role
Raoul Walsh (Actor)
Born: March 11, 1887
Died: December 31, 1980
Trivia: One of Hollywood's most prolific and respected action directors, Raoul Walsh was also one of the longest-lived figures in film, with a career that spanned almost a half-century. After running away from home as a boy and working in a variety of capacities, including as a cowboy in the West, Walsh drifted into stage acting in New York and later into motion pictures as an actor. He became an assistant director to D.W. Griffith and, in 1914, made his first movie. By the mid 1920s, Walsh had a reputation for direct, straightforward, no frills narrative, and his style was particularly suited to action films and outdoor dramas, although his biggest film of that decade was the fantasy epic The Thief of Bagdad, produced by and starring Douglas Fairbanks Sr., which continues to be shown seven decades later. His work in the 1930s, mostly for 20th Century-Fox, embraced comedy and drama in equal measure, but it was with Warner Bros., beginning at the end of the 1930s, that Walsh came into his own, directing such classics as The Roaring Twenties (1939), They Drive By Night (1940), High Sierra (1941), Desperate Journey (1942), and Northern Pursuit (1943), starring James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Errol Flynn. Despite his reputation as an action director, Walsh's movies were usually much more sophisticated than was typical for the genre -- he revelled in psychological themes, and he loved offbeat characterizations and unusual narrative structures, attributes best reflected in the dark Western drama Pursued (1947), starring Robert Mitchum, and the crime film White Heat (1949), with James Cagney. He also served as unofficial co-director on one of Humphrey Bogart's most interesting later movies, The Enforcer (1951). His later movies showed a slackening of style, and he never did seem as effective working in color as he did in black-and-white. Walsh lost an eye while working on In Old Arizona in 1929, and his deteriorating sight in the other eye led to his retirement in 1964.
William Yetter Jr. (Actor)

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