The Jowls of the Earth
Many actors – one thinks of the great Matthau at once – could earn the descriptor “hangdog,” but maybe only Walter Connolly owns it. He looks like somebody literally hanged a dog. They might have buried the word with him, since nobody else can lay claim to it so well anyway.
Connolly’s face exudes suffering. He may, at some point, have appeared on advertisements for liver pills. His very appearance is enough to trigger sympathetic gastric pangs in the viewer. Not all fat men are merry.
Yet Connolly, of his screen persona, was not without his peculiar form of glee. He used words nimbly, suggesting an inner ballerina who could cavort on point only verbally. And his smile, when it appeared, caused awe: how much gravity had to be defied in order to tug those jowls up into a little smirk? All of it: all the gravity there is. So if that man, with that face, could hoist that much blubber skywards in the name of expressing happiness, what excuse have we?
In The League of Frightened Men, Connolly’s girth and slyness and lethargic sag are used to embody detective Nero Wolfe as effectively as a legendary detective has ever been embodied, and the movie packs in much of the charm of Rex Stout’s beloved mysteries. It sadly didn’t spawn a series, perhaps because the idea of more than one film starring Connolly alongside Lionel Stander was more than reason could bear. Stout’s two-fisted narrator Archie Goodwin is a no-nonsense guy, but one pictures him handsome. Stander reveals what such a proletarian bruiser might really be like, revelling in his cosy grossness. (First line, refusing chocolates: “No tanks, dey make me boip.”) Connolly looks like a hippopotamus’s bottom. Stander looks like a baby’s fist. Together they fight crime.
The large man laid claim to another famous detective when he starred in Father Brown, Detective (1934). G.K. Chesterton’s ecclesiastical sleuth has never quite transferred to the screen, and Connolly makes of him a twinkly Irishman the original author would not have recognized. But still, he was one of those rare character actors who can carry a movie, and on one occasion he was given the chance to play, more or less, a romantic lead.
Fifth Avenue Girl is a modest, rather neglected classic by the great comedy director Gregory La Cava. Millionaire businessman Connolly takes working girl Ginger Rogers into his home because she makes him feel alive again. His family assume she’s his mistress and that this is the beginning of a catastrophic mid-life crisis. She isn’t, and the crisis is in fact a positive development. Ginger plays it flat, almost depressive, and is magical as ever. Connolly does all the expressing of emotion that’s needed, driving his snooty wife and kids to distraction as he refuses to behave like an adult anymore. Some fat men naturally resemble babies: with Connolly, the infantile looks grotesque: his face is like melting taffy on the droop.
Though the movie concocts a speedily-delivered and reasonably satisfactory romantic sub-plot for Ginger (Tim Holt in bratty George Amberson Minafer mode), Connolly is her true leading man, and the lack of a love story between them a mere technicality. He even gets to be romantic with his wife, so he has the best of both worlds. Somehow overlooked when lists of great character players are made up and pored over, Connolly is ripe for rediscovery. There were giants on the earth.
by David Cairns