Phooey
Daniel Riccuito Daniel Riccuito

Phooey

His voice comes out of a secret hole between his eyes, that honking New Yawkese of Allen Jenkins – built like a barrel of pickles that fell off the truck on Pearl Street, always avid to be abused in knuckleheaded sidekick roles. Meanwhile, audiences remain free to unconsciously admire that desperate toehold in the coveted world of jobs and three squares a day. For Jenkins plays more than just a “good mug.”

Read More
Frankie Darro: No Strings
Daniel Riccuito Daniel Riccuito

Frankie Darro: No Strings

He was the voice of Lampwick in Walt Disney’s Pinnochio (1940), the bad boy who gets turned into a donkey on Pleasure Island, maybe the most upsetting scene in any Disney cartoon. He was one of two actors inside Robbie the Robot in Forbidden Planet (1956), small enough to fit inside the costume. He played lots of jockeys and Dead End Kids and Bowery Boys, and he made scores of low-budget westerns. He was menaced by Boris Karloff in The Mad Genius (1931). He was a man in a leg cast hoisted up in his hospital bed in Blake Edwards’s The Perfect Furlough (1958) and he examined Cary Grant’s posterior in Edwards’s Operation Petticoat (1959). As an adorable, Jackie Coogan-like little boy, he got a laugh asking a woman to dance in Flesh and the Devil (1927) right before Greta Garbo waltzes away with John Gilbert. He was a son to Marie Dressler’s Tugboat Annie. On Red Skelton’s TV show in the 1950s, he did an old lady routine that routinely brought down the house. Frankie Darro had a long and varied career. And in 1933, in two films, Mayor of Hell and William Wellman’s Wild Boys of the Road, Darro is an actor with a capacity for greatness, if anyone had bothered to notice.

Read More