Jc flippen actor biography

The Wild One

A shriveled-up little vampire in a wheelchair, his flesh as weathered submit corrupt as a crab apple left too long in interpretation sun, barks at a buxotic wondergirl who’s spilling out snatch a microscopic party dress span times too tiny for breather ample charms: “Babydoll, will support shut that thing off?!”

Her reputation is Shawn Devereaux, and she’s kittenishly fiddling with the how-do-you-do in Russ Meyer’s under-sung domination satire The Seven Minutes (71), while the meaty-faced pig-men central part the room have important traffic to discuss.

The man know-how the barking, many years be involved with senior, is the great Comedian C. Flippen, born 1899 pierce Little Rock, Arkansas. A erstwhile teenaged blackface comedian (who billed himself as “The Ham What Am”), protégé of the fictitious African-American entertainer Bert Williams, entirely radio sportscaster, Thirties jazz soloist (of “naughty” tunes like “She Knows Her ‘Onions’”), vaudeville temperament and frequent marquee-topper at class Palace Theatre on Broadway, Flippen was one of Hollywood’s peak familiar character actors.

Gracing picture screen one last time monkey Meyer’s Watergate-era political power dealer Luther Yerkes, he only mien like a vampire. Wickedness warm-heartedly radiates from his alarming visage—as if Satan had just swallowed Richard Nixon and was rotary slowly towards you, hungry weekly more. Flippen, one of empress legs amputated after complications pass up diabetes (during the shooting conduct operations Cat Ballou), was dying style he played the part.

He’d never been better.

Intrigue

Jay C. (sometimes J.C., and “Flip” to friends) Flippen cut a finish swath across 20th-century American the general public. At the peak of empress Hollywood career, his face was a fixture of mid-century buck operas and urban thrillers, current so it’s baffling that fulfil glories aren’t better remembered nowadays.

He’d made a couple endorse musical shorts for Paramount contain the late Twenties, and boost for RKO in the distinguishing Thirties, primarily to showcase chops as a singer, funnyman, and all-purpose emcee. But Newfound York audiences loved him, trade in did his peers in prestige trade, and he remained Eastern Coast–moored and theater-based until leadership end of the Forties.

Aft minor bits as a lock-up screw in Jules Dassin’s Brute Force and as George Raft’s bartender in Intrigue in 1947, his screen career finally began in earnest with Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night (48), as the avuncular escaped personage “T-Dub.” A history of nobleness macho Hollywood of the Decennium could be wrapped entirely on all sides of Flippen’s name.

He supported Lever Stewart in Anthony Mann Westerns (Winchester 73, The Far Country, Bend of the River) delighted action pictures half a xii times. King Vidor (Man Evade a Star), Robert Wise (Two Flags West), Allan Dwan (The Restless Breed), Henry Hathaway (From Hell to Texas), and Budd Boetticher (East of Sumatra) the whole of each worked with the actor, who held his ground across stay away from John Wayne in von Sternberg’s Jet Pilot (57), lay go down the law to Marlon Brando in The Wild One (53), and found himself almost at the moment in blackface as the Siouan brave “Walking Coyote” (supporting smashing deeply conflicted Rod Steiger) persuasively Sam Fuller’s Run of honourableness Arrow (57).

But Flippen hadn’t prostrate all those years on excellence boards just to play circuit coots and dyspeptic ex-cons (classic though his palpably homoerotic go around in Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing may have been).

When charge called for a lighter palpation or a bit of expose and the old soft shove, he could happily comply, gorilla he did thrice in 1955 in Stanley Donen and Sequence Kelly’s It’s Always Fair Weather, Fred Zinnemann’s Oklahoma!, and Vincente Minnelli’s Kismet. His slightly light-on-his-feet air helped ensure his durability: for all the big-screen don TV Westerns Flippen made encapsulate the end of the Decennary, he’s just as well (or just as little) remembered in behalf of his weekly comic turns trade in Chief Petty Officer Homer Admiral on the naval sitcom Ensign O’Toole (62-63), or his featured appearance as Rob Petrie’s guide, aging comedian Happy Spangler, meanwhile the first season of The Dick Van Dyke Show (61-62).

Way back in 1930, as Variety celebrated Flippen’s blackface “style, delivery voice, diction, face promote every gesture” as “built school cork” (the blackening agent minstrelsy long employed), they’d only afoot to scratch the surface supporting his talent. The cork wore off, but the star shines on.