Character Study: John Carradine

                  "Directors never direct me.
                    They just turn me loose."
                     John Carradine

    I suppose if you were going to embark on a study of Hollywood character actors, a natural first question would be: Where do you start? Here's an idea: John Carradine. For the sheer volume of movies he appeared in, Carradine might be the most prolific actor in the history of film. The exact number of titles is unknown and unknowable, but estimates range up to over 500. 
    Starting at the dawn of sound, Carradine appeared in pretty much everything - classics and crap, epics, westerns, swashbucklers, comedies, sci-fi, horror and high drama. He played leads in some B movies, but did most of his best work in support. He worked for John Ford a lot, and logged time with directors as varied as Martin Scorsese, Fritz Lang, Woody Allen and Cecil B. DeMille. He also appeared in some of the worst movies ever made, pictures where the title tells you everything you need to know: "Satan's Cheerleaders", "The House of the Seven Corpses", "Vampire Hookers", "Hell's Bloody Devils" and "Billy the Kid vs. Dracula". 
    He was tall and gaunt, with a famously bony face and a great booming voice that he sometimes put to use reciting Shakespeare on the streets of Hollywood. Carradine claimed he actually delivered those soliloquies at night in the Hollywood Bowl, but the legend persists, circumstantial evidence suggesting that he wasn't just a character actor, he was a character. 
    Another story goes that as a contract player at Fox back in the 1930s, Carradine had a bicycle on the studio lot and would pedal from one set to another, get in costume, play a scene, and be off to the next set, working on several films in a single day. Sometimes his name would appear in the credits and sometimes not. Maybe that's how you end up making 500 movies. 
    He turns up uncredited as one of the hunters who appear at the blind man's cottage in "The Bride of Frankenstein" (1935), and had significant roles as Long Jack in "Captains Courageous" (1937) and the preacher Casy in "The Grapes of Wrath" (1940). As Katharine Hepburn's loyal retainer in "Mary of Scotland" (1937), he even got to sing. He was the gambler in "Stagecoach", Bret Harte in "The Adventures of Mark Twain", a serial murderer in "Bluebeard", Count Dracula in a couple of films, Aaron in "The Ten Commandments", the undertaker in "The Shootist" and the surgeon who turns Rex Reed into Raquel Welch in "Myra Breckinridge". He played priests and wizards and bums, Scrooge and Frankenstein and Abraham Lincoln and Fu Manchu. He never stopped working - his filmography testifies to that - and he was still at it when he died at 82 in 1988.
    He could chew the sound stage with the best of them, but a lot of the movies he did that in were lost causes anyway, and he was often the only thing that made them worth watching. He could be understated, too, when he got a part and a movie that called for that. When he let it rip, he was fun. When he scaled it back, he was better. Either way, he seemed to know instinctively what a picture was worth and what he could get away with, and would calibrate his performance accordingly. One thing you could count on: You always got your money's worth from John Carradine.