We Go Through Life Thinking We’re Bogart

Making a list of the great films in which he appeared would be pointless. It would go on too long and you know them all anyway.

He was a small, mousy little fellow with pinched features beneath a high forehead, wide, watery eyes, a mouth that could not smile and a voice pitched slightly too high. He was factory-made to play nebbishes, henpecked husbands, elevator operators, front desk clerks, twitchy sidekicks, newsboys, the unjustly accused, informers, and the doomed would-be tough. Even as he aged, he was like a puny kid who always wanted to be bigger so he could show all those other kids. He was the Eternal Small-Timer. In short, he was Everyman, and a character actor’s character actor.

Because of this, Elisha Cook, Jr. was in every movie ever made.

It could seem that way sometimes, anyway.

Cook worked constantly in film from the early 1930s to the late ‘50s, when he made the gradual transition to television, and continued working constantly until the late ‘80s. He appeared in every genre from Western to horror to romantic comedy, but following his appearance in The Maltese Falcon (1941) onward for the next two decades, he became such a fixture in crime dramas and noir films that you noticed when his name didn’t appear in the opening credits. It was almost as if the filmmakers had left a space on the screen between “Susan Hayward” and “Whit Bissell,” where “Elisha Cook, Jr.” should have appeared.

Here are two bits of trivia:

In the few crime films in which he didn’t appear—you ever notice this?—you can always spot the actor who’d been hired to play Elisha Cook, Jr. The role usually went to Clifton Young, as in 1947’s Dark Passage.

In Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956), the Great (and nearly as ubiquitous) Marie Windsor famously played Cook’s conniving wife. In later years they would again play a married couple onscreen in at least two other films—The Outfit (1973), also co-starring Killing alumnus Timothy Carey, and Tobe Hooper’s TV miniseries, Salem’s Lot  (1979).

There’s just something about seeing his name in the opening credits, or encountering him unexpectedly at some point in a film. It’s a comfort somehow. He was us. He fretted about his job and what other people might think. He aimed for greatness and came up short. No matter what kind of face he tried to present, you knew deep down he was a decent guy who was trying. In the end he usually died , and there was nothing noble about the dying. But you always knew he’d be back again in the next one, and all would be right with the world.

by Jim Knipfel