Smoke
In 1935, a then-thirteen year-old high school dropout named Frank Cuthbert was arrested in Los Angeles after stealing a revolver. He was sentenced to three years in a notorious reform school in Ione, California.
Shortly after being placed in the reformatory’s version of solitary confinement, Cuthbert ran away, and immediately undertook a bit of a one-man crime spree, robbing several jewelry stores before making the mistake of driving a stolen car across state lines. When he was taken into custody this time, he was sentenced to three years in the federal penitentiary in Springfield, Missouri. Once his sentence at the federal pen was up, he was then transferred to San Quentin on other charges, and was eventually released shortly before turning twenty-one.
After being sprung from Quentin, Cuthbert played it more or less straight, taking on a number of odd jobs around Los Angeles. He at turns worked as a ranch hand, a lumberjack, and a truck driver, along with trying his hand at boxing.
As the story goes, in 1943 Alan Ladd spied a tall and strikingly handsome young man riding a horse through the Los Angeles hills. The two chatted a bit, and Ladd mentioned the encounter to his wife at the time, agent Sue Carol. Carol in turn recommended Cuthbert take a screen test at 20th Century Fox. The test went well enough, and shortly afterward he began appearing in small, uncredited roles in a smattering of forgettable films, usually playing soldiers.
His first on-screen line came in the 1945 Laurel and Hardy vehicle The Bullfighters, in which, thanks to his dark features, he played a Spanish matador. In that same year’s The Great John L. he received his first screen credit as “Frank McCown,” the stage name handed him by some studio executive.
Around that same time McCown, who would never be mistaken for a real actor like John Garfield or James Cagney, signed on with agent Henry Willson. Willson had a reputation in the business for maintaining a stable of outrageously beautiful young men for whom acting ability was often an unnecessary afterthought. Willson also had a thing for catchy, memorable and manly names. So to better fit in with his other clients, like Tab Hunter and Rock Hudson, he re-dubbed his new acquisition “Troy Donahue.”
Then he changed his mind, deciding to save “Troy Donahue” for later. That might work better for a blonde. Instead he went with “Rory Calhoun.” Westerns were all the rage, after all, and it sounded more like a cowboy name.
That one stuck.
In short order, at six-foot-four, ruggedly handsome, and already comfortable on horseback, Calhoun became an inescapable presence in Westerns, usually playing tough guys (often of the bad variety) and almost always in his trademark black cowboy hat. Better still, with his dark hair, swarthy complexion and sharp eyebrows, he could easily play a Mexican if need be, which he often did. Over time, he earned the nickname “Smoke.”
There were a few brief detours for more lighthearted fare like How to Marry a Millionaire and With a Song in My Heart, but then it was always back to Westerns again.
In 1955, a year after co-starring with Robert Mitchum and (for the second time) Marilyn Monroe in River of No Return, and as he was fast becoming a familiar face to American television audiences, Calhoun was targeted by blackmailers. Although their precise demands remain a little fuzzy, the upshot was that if Calhoun didn’t pay up, his criminal record would be leaked to the press, and once that happened he could kiss his career goodbye.
Sometimes, well, blackmailers don’t stop and think things all the way through before issuing a threat. In this case, for instance, they neglected to consider that Calhoun was never exactly averse to playing villains. In response to the threats, he grabbed up his arrest records and handed them over to Henry Willson, who in turn (and with Calhoun’s blessing) handed them over to Confidential magazine for publication at their earliest convenience.
It was a win-win for everyone except the blackmailers. Confidential got a big scoop. Willson had cut a deal with the magazine, and by handing them that Calhoun exclusive, the editors agreed to kill a planned story about the secret gay lifestyle of another Willson client, Rock Hudson. And Calhoun’s career got a boost, as the Romantic tales of his misspent youth only bolstered his offscreen reputation as a tough guy.
As westerns began dying off in the early Sixties, Calhoun expanded his repertoire, taking roles in adventure films, detective shows, spy thrillers, historical dramas, soap operas and comedies, including a memorable turn as Jonathan Kincaid in a 1967 episode of Gilligan’s Island spoofing The Most Dangerous Game.
Then came the Seventies and Eighties.
Thanks to a variety of economic and cultural forces, once venerable stars found themselves forced to take roles in low-rent genre films. So, for reasons they’d rather not talk about, we found Joan Crawford starring in the apeman-on-the-loose picture Trog, Ida Lupino in The Devil’s Rain and Food of the Gods, Kirk Douglas smirking his way through The Final Countdown and Saturn 3, an understandably drunk Ralph Meeker in The Alpha Incident, and John Huston, Shelley Winters and Henry Fonda co-starring in Tentacles, the Italian-produced Jaws knockoff about a giant octopus.
As embarrassed as the above must have been for taking those roles, few actors in their waning years can lay claim to a sub-B filmography quite as extensive as Calhoun’s.
The first sign of things to come came in 1972, when Calhoun co-starred with Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh in the marauding giant bunny rabbit movie Night of the Lepus. Seven years later he starred in The Revenge of Bigfoot, which was admittedly one of the better entries in the sub-genre of Bigfoot movies. It’s worth noting that in both cases Calhoun, never a great actor, played it straight-faced, bringing an unusual gravity to the ridiculous goings-on.
In 1980 Calhoun was officially introduced to the slasher film generation, starring in the hit black comedy Motel Hell, in which he played a kindly but demented farmer who, with his sister, ensnared passing teens before butchering them and turning them into fritters which they sold to the locals. He followed that up with a charming and charismatic turn as Kit Carson, an aging Hollywood Boulevard performer and storyteller who befriends the local hookers in Angel, a teen exploitation film that wasn’t nearly as prurient as it claimed. After reprising his role in the following year’s sequel, Avenging Angel, it was on to the low-brow dystopian comedy, Hell Comes to Frogtown, with wrestler-turned-actor Rowdy Roddy Piper. He then ended his B film career in 1989 with a supporting role in a something-or-other called Roller Blade Warriors: Taken by Force.
I never saw that last one.
A seventy-year-old Calhoun ended his career on a high and respectable note with a well-received turn in Pure Country before dying in 1999. Funny thing is, looking back over a fascinating and storied life, and a fifty-year acting career in which he appeared in some eighty films and Every TV Show Ever Made, I can’t help but think he was a hell of a lot better in the cheap exploitation films than he was in the Westerns.
by Jim Knipfel