I have been working on a list of things whose presence alone can render a movie at least watchable. One of them is a character dashing a salt shaker into a mug of beer. Other examples include:
*Maps being drawn in the mud of a river bank with a pointy stick.
*Squinting, denim jackets, and expressively rolled cigarettes.
*The hero, after being brutally beaten, dragging himself into a forlorn, overlooked corner to slowly recuperate and plot his revenge. (This is called The Yojimbo.)
Surprisingly high up on this list, when ranked by infallibility, is the presence of Emile Meyer.
I cannot say exactly when I first became aware of Emile Meyer. As a teenager I saw Paths of Glory, in which Meyer dons a cassock and cappello roman to play the priest who leads the condemned soldiers to their execution, walking arm and arm with Timothy Carey’s howling Pvt. Ferol. Kubrick always had a particular fondness for faces that weren’t, shall we say, movie star faces, like Meyer’s and Carey’s. Case in point: The Killing, which includes such indelible character actor mugs as Carey, Jay C. Flippen, the ubiquitous Elisha Cook, Jr., Ted de Corsia, and Kola Kwariani.
But as I think further on it, I believe it was somewhere between The Lineup (1958) and Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954), while working my way through the Don Siegel filmography, that the image of Meyer first really embedded itself in my mind. Most of those who’ve seen the former picture will immediately remember Eli Wallach and Robert Keith as a duo of philosophical psychopaths terrorizing San Francisco. Theirs is clearly the material that galvanized Siegel, and it is chilling to imagine just how dull of a narrative The Lineup would have been if they didn’t gradually take it over. However, the circumstances of the film—it was conceived as a spinoff from the CBS police procedural radio/ TV drama of the same name, the pilot of which Siegel had directed—demanded that it begin with series star Warner Anderson as the investigating Lieutenant setting off on their trail. For reasons unknown, Anderson’s TV partner, Tom Tully, is absent. In his place, however, there is a stocky, sweaty, squinty, middle-aged, footsore, hemorrhoidal, rumpled, potato-sack lumpy actor with a thick-tongued delivery and a Crisco comb-back of thinning hair who bears an uncanny resemblance to my 4th grade math teacher, Mr. Eisert. Ladies and gentlemen, Emile Meyer.
The Lineup was the third film in which Siegel had used Meyer, preceded by Riot and 1957’s Baby Face Nelson, which had Mickey Rooney in the title role. Here is Siegel, in one of the signature screenplay-style dialogues that dot autobiography “A Don Siegel Film,” on the decision to cast Meyer in Riot—the only appearance of the actor’s name that I could find in my Index-less copy:
WANGER: Let’s get on with the casting. What about the Warden?
ME: Emile Meyer looks the part and fits the character.
WANGER: I know Emile. A good choice.
Juicy stuff, no? “WANGER,” incidentally, is Riot’s producer, Walter Wanger, who had been inspired to make the film after a four-month stay at the Castaic Honor Farm, a minimum security prison facility north of Los Angeles, where he had been sent after shooting MCA talent agent Jennings Lang. The legend has it that Wanger caught Lang in flagrante delicto with Joan Bennett, Wanger’s wife and Lang’s client, and was enough of a crack shot to clip off one of Lang’s testes with his bullet, which allegedly prompted Bennett to riposte, “Oh, for Chrissakes, Walter, he’s only an agent!”
I found a rather more amusing—if not much more revealing—reference to Meyer in John G. Stephens’ From “My Three Sons to Major Dad: My Life as a TV Producer”:
“Sometimes, like in Big House USA, Schenck and Koch wanted to cast against type. I remember seeing Riot in Cell Block 11 with a very unusual actor playing the prison warden. A real rough, tough-looking guy, Emile Meyer, who spoke with a lisp. He was excellent. I also remembered Meyer’s performance as Ryker, the lead heavy in the movie Shane. I bring him in to meet Schenck and Koch. They’re thrilled. Going through the dailies for Big House, Meyer seems to be great. After production on Big House finishes, and we’re starting to cast for the next film, Aubrey calls me in.
‘Ya know whatcha gotta do, kid. Ya gotta bring us more people like Emile Meyer. When we suggested Emile Meyer to you, you didn’t know who he was… you gotta start thinking like that. Bring us more Emile Meyers.’
‘Right, Aubrey’
Out comes Big House USA. The reviews are quite good. The only person the critics rap is Emile Meyer. ‘A good movie that couldn’t be ruined by the amateurish Emile Meyer.’ Aubrey calls me in again.
‘Don’t bring us any more bums like Emile Meyer. Use your head.’
‘Right, Aubrey, never again.’”
Riot seems not to have surfaced on commercial DVD; I see that The Lineup is available in a set of Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics released in 2009, alongside Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat and the great Phil Karlson’s 5 Against the House (I am told that the commentary track for The Lineup features “L.A. Confidential” author James Ellroy opining thusly on Meyer’s screen persona: “That motherfucker would take you in the back room, plant a throwdown gun on you, then beat the shit out of you with a phone book.”) For those unconcerned with watching things right , it can also be viewed in its entirety on YouTube .
The Internet does not, surprisingly, runneth over with information about Meyer, but here are some of the generally agreed-upon facts. Meyer was born in New Orleans, Lousiana, in 1910; to this we can partly attribute his particularly slushy drawl. The epigram of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” has popularized the following passage from A.J. Liebling’s “The Earl of Louisiana,” which describes the “ Yat dialect ” of metropolitan New Orleans:
“There is a New Orleans city accent… associated with downtown New Orleans, particularly with the German and Irish Third Ward, that is hard to distinguish from the accent of Hoboken, Jersey City, and Astoria, Long Island, where the Al Smith inflection, extinct in Manhattan, has taken refuge. The reason, as you might expect, is that the same stocks that brought the accent to Manhattan imposed it on New Orleans.”
Hence Meyer’s trademark “lisp,” not always a boon. Reviewing Paths of Glory in the NY Times and condemning Kubrick’s decision to have his Frenchmen speak in American vernaculars, the august Bosley Crowther singles out Meyer for especial attention: “Emile Meyer is perhaps least effective (when he speaks) in the role of a French priest.”
To return to the biography—what few sources exist concur that previous to his middle-aged debut in pictures, Meyer basically had stuck around his hometown holding a variety of odd jobs; per one: “longshoreman, safety inspector, cab driver, insurance salesman.” How, then, did this unprepossessing working man become the screen’s most unlikely freshman since Sydney Greenstreet heaved his mass into The Maltese Falcoln? Well, Elia Kazan was an early advocate of urban location shooting off of the New York-Los Angeles axis, and when Gadge’s production of Panic in the Streets—concerned with a race-against-the-clock effort to prevent an outbreak of plague in New Orleans—touched down in Southern Louisiana, Meyer was among the locals discovered and cast (uncredited) as the captain of the ship Nile Queen, in which capacity the 40-year-old-and-looking-50-something amateur holds his own opposite Richard Widmark. This was followed by an apprenticeship period—we find Meyer billed as Capt. Meyer in a “Mardi Gras” episode of a TV series called The Unexpected—until his big break as the ranch boss in 1953’s Shane, in which Meyer delivers the impassioned monologue for which he is best remembered, if he is remembered at all. (When I told my opposite number in a two-man Meyer mini-cult that Emile was to be the subject of my weekly column, he responded: “I hope SundanceNOW doesn’t crash from the traffic.”)
After Shane, Meyer’s phone scarcely ceased to ring. Having proven that he could convincingly heft himself onto horseback, Meyer was much in-demand in Westerns, usually as lawmen: He is the Sheriff who causes trouble for John Payne by getting plugged in Allan Dwan’s 1954 Silver Lode, and also pins on the star in Jacques Tourneur’s 1955 Stranger on Horseback and Andrew V. MacLaglen’s 1956 Gun the Man Down. Capt. Meyer was also frequently asked to button his girth into a policeman’s tunic, most memorably as Kello, the jovially-menacing “fat cop” in Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 Sweet Smell of Success (“Come back, Sidney, I want to chastise you.”), though also quite effective opposite Jerry Lewis’ rebel without a cause in 1957’s The Delicate Delinquent and singlehandedly authenticating the soundstage steaminess of Otto Preminger’s 1955 The Man with the Golden Arm. The ‘60s largely found Meyer increasingly given over to television work of the detective/Sergeant/ship’s captain type, though he pops up in the 1974 drive-in smash Macon County Line, and has a poignant cameo vending guns out of a briefcase in John Flynn’s The Outfit. A 1973 adaptation of the Richard Stark/Donald Westlake “Parker” novels, which also provided material for John Boorman’s Point Blank, Flynn’s Outfit is a sort of requiem for the American blue-collar crime programmer, with Meyer appearing alongside Timothy Carey, Elisha Cook, Jr., and an obviously-ailing Robert Ryan, who would very soon be dead of cancer.
Meyer would himself succumb to Alzheimer’s in March of 1987; his family plot in New Orleans’ Greenwood Cemetery is visible, for those so inclined to pay virtual respects, on Findagrave.com. A more intriguing piece of Internet ephemera: Meyer’s AllMovie Guide entry, by Hal Erickson, yields the following tidbit: “In addition to his acting work, Emile G. Meyer also wrote TV and movie scripts. On that subject, Meyer was given to complaining in public as to how the old-boy network of Hollywood producers tended to freeze out any writer without a long list of screenplay credits.”
Somebody find that rusted shut filing cabinet and pry it open! What are those scripts like? Crime thrillers? Autobiography? Erotic reverie? Something in the nature of fellow character actor Marc Lawrence’s 1972 Pigs a/k/a Daddy’s Deadly Darlin’? If pictures don’t have glorious Drew Friedman faces like Meyer’s anymore, at the very least someone can get cracking on putting one of his yellowing scripts into production!
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.