Edmond O'Brien

Throughout his 35-year movie career, he was mainly a character actor, albeit on the highest rungs of the ladder.  He  appeared in countless famous films and people who went to movies during Hollywood's Golden Age have seen his work over and over again.  At the same time, he was given starring roles in a number of B films, many of which were film noir.  Edmond O'Brien and crime just seemed to go together.

I am certain I saw all of his 1950's films when they were first released.  I liked him well enough to catch some of the earlier ones later on.  Along with film noir, he popped up in quite a few westerns... this sentence alone would tell you how I came to be familiar with Edmond O'Brien.

He was always an attention-grabber.  He yelled a lot and he could manage to screw his face up into something quite menacing.  He rather scared me when I was a very young moviegoer.  There was always a great urgency in his acting.  To this day I remember coming out of the theater where my mother and I had just seen Pete Kelly's Blues, where O'Brien played a particularly vicious thug.  We were discussing that when she called his acting overheated.  I remember that as much because I didn't know what she meant or if I did, I thought it might have been something dirty.

While overheated Edmond O'Brien was a prominent actor in some 69 movies he was rarely a romantic lead and when he was, it's unlikely he set anyone's heart aflutter.  He just wasn't the type. But his characters were strong, gutsy and memorable.  I found him to be an asset to the movies.

He was born in Brooklyn in 1915 to parents who had come over from Ireland.  The youngster first ventured into performance art when a neighbor, Harry Houdini, taught him how to perform magic.  The enterprising kid became an instant celebrity in his neighborhood and he rather liked the attention.  

An aunt, who taught high school English and speech, took him to a Broadway play and the die was cast.  He appeared in high school plays and majored in drama during a brief stay at Fordham College.  So good was he that he received a scholarship to the famed Neighborhood Playhouse where Sanford Meisner taught him The Method.  

Movie debut

He made his Broadway debut at age 21.  After a number of appearances and good notices, he attracted the attention of an RKO producer, Pandro S. Berman, who signed O'Brien to play Gringoire the poet in 1939's The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Charles Laughton and Maureen O'Hara.  He enjoyed making the film but still considered himself a stage actor.  He could hardly catch his breath when he signed to appear back on Broadway with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in Romeo and Juliet. 

RKO signed O'Brien to a contract and he made six films in the early 40's, a fair amount considering he also pulled a stint in the Army Air Force.  He also had a very brief marriage to one of his costars, Nancy Kelly.

I've long thought one of his lucky charms was certainly Ava Gardner.  The three films he made with her are all ones that garnered O'Brien lots of attention.  The first, the superb noir, The Killers (1946), he played an insurance man investigating why two hired thugs would kill a gas station attendant (Burt Lancaster).  Gardner was superb as a moll.

In another noir, The Web (1947), he copped a lead role as a crook's bodyguard who feels he's being set up to be a fall guy.  He seemed surprisingly under-heated while acting kudos were directed toward Ella Raines and Vincent Price.  It was a taut thriller never seen by large numbers, unfortunately.

O'Brien plays a press agent in A Double Life (1947), a film that garnered much attention for Ronald Colman's Oscar-winning gem of a performance.  In 1948 O'Brien signed a contract with Warner Bros. and they immediately put him in Another Part of the Forest, a prequel to The Little Foxes.  He is superb as the conniving, amoral older Hubbard son.  Unfortunately but not necessarily unexpectedly the film itself didn't acquire the glory of its predecessor.

In 1948, O'Brien married little-known actress Olga San Juan and they remained together until their 1976 divorce.  They had three children.  O'Brien would not marry again.

One of O'Brien's most acclaimed films is the Freudian gangster epic, White Heat (1949).  He plays a cop who infiltrates a gang headed by James Cagney in one of his most famous roles.  Who could ever forget the ending with Cagney atop that burning tower... Made it, Ma.  Top of the world.

D.O.A. (1949) is a noir that vibrates with excitement and O'Brien in the starring role has one of the best ones of his long career.  He plays a tax accountant who has been mysteriously poisoned (thankfully a slow-moving toxin or this would have been a very short film) and he sets out to find the party responsible.  

711 Ocean Drive (1950), another taut noir, features O'Brien as a greedy telephone repairman who gets cozy with a crime syndicate with most unpleasant results.  O'Brien and lovely Joanne Dru do a lot of running and hiding in this one.

In 1951 O'Brien got some publicity that he didn't care for.  He got into a brawl at a restaurant with Serge Rubinstein, a convicted draft dodger.  That was not the issue for the fight but rather loud and vulgar language that O'Brien objected to.  Both participants ended up with bloody faces but nothing more came of the incident.

Ida Lupino, whom O'Brien had known at Warners, had embarked on a directing career and he was lucky enough to star in two of her films.  The first is her best... The Hitch-hiker (1953).  He and
Frank Lovejoy are on a fishing trip when they pick up a stranded man (William Talman, Hamilton Berger of Perry Mason fame) who is a psychopath.  The B film is nonstop tension from start to finish.

A jittery scene from The Hitch-hiker

Lupino and Joan Fontaine are O'Brien's wives in The Bigamist (1953).  It isn't as good or even as interesting as it could have been but I liked it.  Oddly, in real life Lupino and Fontaine had been the wives of the same man although not at the same time.

He played the conspirator Casca in MGM's 1953 production of Julius Caesar (1953) alongside such heavyweights as Marlon Brando, Deborah Kerr, James Mason, Greer Garson and John Gielgud.  O'Brien was always dabbling in Shakespeare.

The Barefoot Contessa (1954) provided him with a supporting Oscar for playing a sweaty, unctuous publicity guy involved in the life of a recently-deceased actress.  The story is told in flashbacks by the various men who knew her.  Gardner had the title role with Humphrey Bogart as a director and Rossano Brazzi as her tormented husband.

With Ava Gardner in The Barefoot Contessa

In 1955 he had two of his best roles.  In the aforementioned Pete Kelly's Blues he played a 1920's ruthless racketeer who tried to horn in on Jack Webb's small band at seedy bar, offering protection when it wasn't wanted.  O'Brien is so vicious, particularly in his treatment of his moll, well-played by songbird Peggy Lee. 

The same year he was top-billed in 1984 concerning a totalitarian future society where falling in love is forbidden.  O'Brien made the mistake of doing just that... with Jan Sterling.  The film, based on George Orwell's famous novel, had mixed reviews but made a lot of noise.

By the mid-50's he began putting on weight and his health was not the best.  His voice afforded him the opportunity to not only work on radio but to star on it.  He still navigated between films and the stage but episodic television became more of a mainstay as did a run in his own series, Sam Benedict.

The Last Voyage (1960) is a realistic ship disaster movie concerning an explosion that traps a female passenger under fallen steel beams as the water slowly rises.  I found it tense and exciting (thanks to excellent writing, camerawork and the acting of its stars, Dorothy Malone and Robert Stack).  O'Brien, as an engineer, found the filming unsafe and he left the production in a huff.  When he cooled off and returned, he found that he was no longer needed and the remainder of his scenes had been scrapped.

He didn't shoot but annoyed Liberty Valance

The year 1962 was both a good and bad one for O'Brien.  He appeared in three big movies starting with one of his best-ever character parts as an alcoholic newspaper editor in the superb John Ford western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  James Stewart, John Wayne and Lee Marvin shared some good scenes with O'Brien.  Fans noticed that he was looking older than his years.

He appeared again with Lancaster in the very human but largely fictional prison drama, Birdman of Alcatraz.  He was one of many stars in the epic war film, The Longest Day).  He was signed to play the photo-journalist in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) but suffered a heart attack and was replaced with another superb character actor and friend, Arthur Kennedy.  

Seven Days in May (1964) is a taut political thriller that addresses paranoia and fear during  the cold war.  In addition to a good Rod Serling script, the film is noted for a powerhouse of performances from Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Fredric March and O'Brien as a ingenious senator.  He was so good that he copped another Oscar nomination.  Ava Gardner did her last turn as his good-luck charm.

Rio Conchos (1964) is one of my favorite B westerns with O'Brien as a mad, former Confederate colonel who wants to sell rifles to a band of warring Apaches headed by the magnificent Rodolfo Acosta.  Stuart Whitman, Richard Boone and Tony Franciosa are out to stop the sale.  Lots of colorful action and fun. 

As Pardee in Rio Conchos

Fantastic Voyage (1966) is indeed quite fantastic.  A team of scientists and a submarine are miniaturized and put into the bloodstream of a colleague who is suffering from a brain clot as a result of an assassination attempt.  O'Brien plays a general in charge of the project.  I remember resisting seeing this but ultimately did and enjoyed it.

The Wild Bunch (1969) turned out to be O'Brien's last big movie... and big it was.  Considered at the time the most violent western ever made, it hasn't particularly slipped in that regard in all these subsequent years.  It concerns over-the-hill cowboys who want to make their mark on the world before it's too late and it comes in the form of a botched bank robbery.  William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson, Warren Oates, Jaime Sanchez and O'Brien are the title stars with Robert Ryan in hot pursuit.  I regard it as one of the finest westerns ever made.

In 1974 he signed for a cop role in the fright film Black Christmas but the part was suddenly recast with John Saxon when it was determined O'Brien was too sick to continue.  It was rumored he had Alzheimer's.  From then on, he did mainly television.  He had a difficult time remembering lines and his vision was poor. 

After 1974, he worked no more.  He had been an avid amateur photographer and an even more devoted reader.  It has been said that he had the largest personal library of any actor in Hollywood.  He also had a phenomenal memory before he got sick... well, things were a lot different in his remaining years.  They were said to be terrible years for him... 11 of them.  Apparently the Motion Picture Hospital wouldn't take him in because they took no one with mental illness.  He lived cheaply and reclusively in Santa Monica.

Edmond O'Brien died in 1985 at a sanatorium in Inglewood, California, from complications of Alzheimer's.  He was 69 years old.

Last year, 33 years after his death, one of his films was released for the first time.  What, you say?  Is his old pal Houdini's magic involved here?  No, but another magician and also a movie director, Orson Welles, is responsible.  Welles started The Other Side of the Wind in 1970 but it never got finished, much less released.  That is, until 2018.  And there is Edmond O'Brien.  He could still get overheated although not like in the 50's.  I always appreciated him as an actor.  He always gave it all he had. 


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