There's been no end of great character actors who were able to elevate merely because of their presence; they've made bad films tolerable and good films even better.. One of my favorite actors was Guy Kibbee.
Kibbee (1882-1056) was born in El Paso. When he was fourteen he ran away from home to join a traveling show and began working on riverboats and for traveling stock companies. Early in his career he played romantic leads but then began to lose his hair at age nineteen, His Broadway debut (Torch Song, 1930) garnered great reviews and Hollywood beckoned. He signed with Paramount Pictures, and later Warmer Brothers, appearing often as jovial and not very bright characters. Some of his more memorable roles were in 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, Captain Blood, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Rain, and Our Town. He had the title roles in 1934's Babbitt, in the 1935 Shirley Temple vehicle Captain January, and in 1936's Jim Hanvey, Detective. Beginning in 1941, he starred in a series of six films featuring Clarence Budington Kelland's popular character Scattergood Baines; Baines was featured in 108 short stories from 1917 to 1953 in, first, The Saturday Evening Post, then, in The American Magazine; some of the stories were collected in three book by Kelland. Baines was also featured in a radio series from 1938 through 1950. (Kelland is also noted for writing the story on which the Gary Cooper film Mr. Deeds Goes to Town was based.)
Scattergood Baines uses his wits to help the people of his small town. Scattergood Survives a Murder, the fifth film in the series, veers somewhat from the previous formula by presenting a B=movie murder mystery. Two reclusive spinsters are kill in a horse-and-buggy accident and when the relatives descend to see who inherits, they discover that the two have left their fortune to their cat. Then the murders start... And Scattergood is hand to resolve everything.
Directed by Christy Carbanne, with a script by Michael L. Simmons, adapting the Kelland story "The Closed Room" (The American Magazine, five parts, September 1934 through January 1935). The film features a host of familiar faces, if not familiar names -- John Archer, Margaret Hayes, Wallace Ford, Spencer Charters, Eily Malyon, John Miljan, George Chandler, Dick Elliott, Florence Lake, Sarah Edwards, and Willie Best, among others.
Enjoy this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eu5-FKRouUM
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