Republic Pictures contract player EDGAR ALLAN

Edgar Allan played one of the eponymous hero's fellow young g men in the 1937 Republic serial DICK TRACY; and he had bits in such studio potboilers as THE MANDARIN MYSTERY (1936; an Ellery Queen mystery now in public domain and available for free at the Internet Archive site), BEWARE OF LADIES (1936), JOIN THE MARINES and MICHAEL O'HALLORAN (both 1937). Edgar Allan was underTerm Contract with Republic Pictures 10-5-1936 to 4-4-1937, after which he disappeared from the industry.

                                                                           

Helen Chapman in Outlaw Roundup (1944)

I readily admit a fondness for PRC westerns. Uncomplicated little oaters with a wonderful stock company of old reliables doing what they do best and paying little or no heed to PRC nicknames like Pretty Rotten Crap or, worse yet, Prick Productions.  OUTLAW ROUNDUP is typical: a solid plot that has the eponymous TEXAS RANGERS, James Newill, Dave O'Brien and Guy Wilkerson, go undercover to track down the buried loot of imprisoned bandit Jack Ingram. Along for the ride are such fondly remembered genre perennials as I. Stanford Jolley, Charlie King, Reed Howes, Frank Ellis, Budd Buster and, on the side of law and order for a change, Bud Osborne. And Helen Chapman as Sheriff Osborne's pretty daughter.

Chapman, truth be told, sounds OUTLAW ROUNDUP's only sour note, a pedestrian performance even for PRC. So more startling is it to find Miss Chapman a few years later costarring with Todd Karns, of IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE fame, in JACKSON AND JILL (1949), a pre I LOVE LUCY television sitcom, in which she is Karns' dumbbell wife. It is, of course, a completely politically incorrect performance but not bad really for all that. You may find JACKSON AND JILL episodes online and, like this writer, wonder why Helen Chapman's career remained as low wattage as it did. 

From my unpublished "FADEOUT, the Last Film of ..." HELEN WALKER

 

Because she toiled mostly in Paramount B-pictures, Helen Walker is not much remembered. But she remains unforgettable for those who have seen MURDER, HE SAYS  (1945), about the lunatic Fleagle family of hillbillies of which Walker may or may not be a member, or some of her later films noir including NIGHTMARE ALLEY (1947). By then, however, Walker was starring in her own, private, noir when on December 31, 1946, after having picked up three hitchhiking veterans, she smashed her car into a road divider. One of the veterans was killed instantly, the other two and Helen herself emerged seriously injured. She was accused of drunk driving by one or both of the surviving soldiers and although found not guilty of ooo criminal charges "for lack of evidence," she was replaced by Marjorie Reynolds in the Western fantasy HEAVEN ONLY KNOWS (1947). Stardom over, Walker played character roles for a while but by the mid-1950s she was suffering from acute alcoholism. (At one point she was rumored to have arrived at a birthda party with gifts wrapped in still photos from her old movies.) She lost her home to a devastating fire in 1960 and friends such as Dinah Shore and Ruth Roman staged a benefit for her. By the time of her death from cancer, Helen Walker resided in a small apartment in North Hollywood.

The last film of Helen Walker:

THE BIG COMBO (Allied Artists, 1955) D: Joseph H. Lewis. CAST: Cornel Wilde, Richard Conte, Brian Donlevy, Jean Wallace, Robert Middleton, Lee Van Cleef, Earl Holliman, Helen Walker (Alicia Brown), Jay Adler. A dedicated police lieutenant (Wilde) goes after a mob boss (Brown) by following a clue leading to the latter's wife (Walker). Walker's character in this classic noir is much talked about before actually seen, much like Mrs. Mona Mars in THE BIG SLEEP (1946). Filmed at King Studios in Hollywood and produced by star Cornel Wilde and his wife at the time, the film's leading lady Jean Sullivan. 

Felice Ingersoll in Range Justice (1949)

Sometimes one cannot help wonder why the old B Western producers felt obliged to have a pretty girl in their productions. Well, outside of the obvious. Because usually the girls were given very little to do other than perhaps get in the way of the action in a scene or two and wave goodbye to the hero as he rides into the sunset - alone. Always alone, or with a male sidekick. In the case of Johnny Mack Brown's latter day RANGE JUSTICE (1949), the girl, Felice Ingersoll, isn't even present to say the obligatory god's speed but leaves that entirely up to her brother, Riley Hill. In fact, Miss Ingersoll has only two very brief scenes and why she is even in the picture is anyone's guess. Was she the girlfriend of someone? Probably. Meanwhile, that old battle ax Sarah Padden takes care of the female acting glory with her usual aplomb as an ornery lady rancher who hires Mack Brown to help her with a nestler problem. But as Johnny quickly learns, the criminal element isn't the nestlers but instead townie Tristram Coffin, who of course is after Sarah's valuable water rights.  And so it goes.

Felice Ingersoll, meanwhile, had earlier been under contract to 20th Century-Fox, where she had cooled her heels alongside an equally misused pre-stardom Marilyn Monroe, but she was really better known as a chorus girl and band singer. RANGE JUSTICE was her only film of any importance. If you could call it that. And a Monogram Western was hardly the Big League, even though this one in particular is quite well written and moves swiftly from point A to point B. 

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Ruth Clifford and the Tim Holt unit 1941

I met Ruth Clifford a couple of times at social functions. I recall our mutual host, UCLA nitrate maven Bob Gitt, introducing Ruth to the gathering with, "Here's Ruth Clifford everybody!" To which the 93-year-old quipped: "Or what's left of her!" But there was a lot left of Ruth Clifford, if not in the tiny frame then in a quick-witted mind that belied her advanced age. As old as the century, the Rhode Island born, Los Angeles reared Clifford entered films while still a teenager. A star for Carl Laemmle's Universal, Ruth remembered for us how uncomfortably it felt to "make love," cinematically, to aging matinee idol Monroe Salisbury, whose dentures and hairpiece both came equally askew in the clinch. The film in question was THE SAVAGE (1917), one of several outdoorsy melodramas she would make. (And, incidentally, the screen debut of future silent mega star Colleen Moore.)

Clifford became an extra/bit player in sound films, notably for John Ford, who, she admitted, usually brought her along more for her bridge-playing skills (they were both fanatics) than for any other reason and you usually had to look long and hard for a glimpse of her.

Ruth actually had a bigger role in the 1941 Tim Holt oater ALONG THE RIO GRANDE. She plays the hostess of a below-the-border dive where she not only keeps pretty songstress Betty Jane Rhodes more or less captive but also stupidly allows Ray Whitley to perform for a small but ecstatic crowd, Ray in reality being in cahoots with Tim Holt, who has infiltrated nasty Robert Fiske's gang of cutthroats. And it is Ruth who overhears Tim confess that he in reality is working with sheriff Hal Taliaferro and soon the jig is up. Cue a bullet strewn finale.

While with the Holt RKO unit, Clifford also turned up in LAND OF THE OPEN RANGE (rel. 1942), but here she was merely a townswoman, the kind of minuscule part she played in most of her sound films. By the time I met Ruth Clifford, she was staying in in one of the bungalows at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA, the retirement facility that Mary Pickford and Jean Hersholt had help fund, and it was here she died at the ripe old age of 98 in 1998.