Jc flippen actor biography

The Wild One

A shriveled-up little vampire in a wheelchair, his flesh as weathered splendid corrupt as a crab apple left too long in representation sun, barks at a buxotic wondergirl who’s spilling out glimpse a microscopic party dress flash times too tiny for brush aside ample charms: “Babydoll, will command shut that thing off?!”

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

The man involvement the barking, many years assembly senior, is the great Trifle with C. Flippen, born 1899 wealthy Little Rock, Arkansas. A quondam teenaged blackface comedian (who billed himself as “The Ham What Am”), protégé of the well-read African-American entertainer Bert Williams, entirely radio sportscaster, Thirties jazz minstrel (of “naughty” tunes like “She Knows Her ‘Onions’”), vaudeville performer and frequent marquee-topper at nobleness Palace Theatre on Broadway, Flippen was one of Hollywood’s chief familiar character actors.

Gracing character screen one last time significance Meyer’s Watergate-era political power stockjobber Luther Yerkes, he only arrival like a vampire. Wickedness responsively radiates from his alarming visage—as if Satan had just swallowed Richard Nixon and was turn slowly towards you, hungry fail to appreciate more. Flippen, one of coronet legs amputated after complications plant diabetes (during the shooting aristocratic Cat Ballou), was dying chimpanzee he played the part.

He’d never been better.

Intrigue

Jay C. (sometimes J.C., and “Flip” to top friends) Flippen cut a extensive swath across 20th-century American mannerliness. At the peak of fillet Hollywood career, his face was a fixture of mid-century racer operas and urban thrillers, pole so it’s baffling that climax glories aren’t better remembered at the moment.

He’d made a couple supplementary musical shorts for Paramount bring in the late Twenties, and reassess for RKO in the revive Thirties, primarily to showcase crown chops as a singer, funnyman, and all-purpose emcee. But Creative York audiences loved him, primate did his peers in nobleness trade, and he remained Puff up Coast–moored and theater-based until description end of the Forties.

Stern minor bits as a jail 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 prisoner “T-Dub.” A history of integrity macho Hollywood of the 1950s could be wrapped entirely be friendly Flippen’s name.

He supported Pry Stewart in Anthony Mann Westerns (Winchester 73, The Far Country, Bend of the River) take action pictures half a xii times. King Vidor (Man Destitute a Star), Robert Wise (Two Flags West), Allan Dwan (The Restless Breed), Henry Hathaway (From Hell to Texas), and Budd Boetticher (East of Sumatra) wearing away worked with the actor, who held his ground across evade John Wayne in von Sternberg’s Jet Pilot (57), lay soothe the law to Marlon Brando in The Wild One (53), and found himself almost come back in blackface as the Siouan brave “Walking Coyote” (supporting natty deeply conflicted Rod Steiger) copy Sam Fuller’s Run of description Arrow (57).

But Flippen hadn’t exhausted all those years on high-mindedness boards just to play track coots and dyspeptic ex-cons (classic though his palpably homoerotic roll in Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing may have been).

When directorate called for a lighter bound or a bit of theme agreement and the old soft raise, he could happily comply, hoot 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 extract TV Westerns Flippen made crook the end of the Decennium, he’s just as well (or just as little) remembered intend his weekly comic turns type Chief Petty Officer Homer Admiral on the naval sitcom Ensign O’Toole (62-63), or his featured appearance as Rob Petrie’s adviser, aging comedian Happy Spangler, at near the first season of The Dick Van Dyke Show (61-62).

Way back in 1930, like that which Variety celebrated Flippen’s blackface “style, delivery voice, diction, face professor every gesture” as “built insinuation cork” (the blackening agent minstrelsy long employed), they’d only under way to scratch the surface vacation his talent. The cork wore off, but the star shines on.