Scales of presence: Bess Flowers and the Hollywood extra

Abstract

Roughly thirty-five minutes into the 1949 film Mighty Joe Young (Ernest B. Schoedsack, RKO) a lengthy scene transpires in a cavernous nightclub. This club is the venue in which the film's title character, a giant ape kidnapped from his native habitat, will make his debut as a New York entertainment attraction. The camera dollies across the main floor of the club, cutting a path through an enormous crowd of people in order to approach a long bar. It then glides along that bar as several customers, sitting singly or in clusters, each receive a few seconds of attention. Most of them utter a line or two. I have remembered this scene since my adolescence for the rich parade of character actors and bit players it offers up, each of them reduced here to a few seconds of screen time. We see one-time Universal serials heroine Anne Nagel, now well into her decline into bit parts; Norman Willis, William Newell, James Burke and Edward Gargan, all of them hardworking small part players since the early 1930s; and character actor Charles Lane, who entered films in 1931 and died in 2005 at the age of 102, known for a career that included most of Frank Capra's sound films and hundreds of others. Most unexpectedly, in a role consisting of two or three lines and a mad laugh, we see Irene Ryan, one moment in her lengthy transition from vaudeville to television stardom as ‘Granny’ on The Beverly Hillbillies (CBS, 1962–71) (figure 1).