Edward G. Robinson: Patron Saint of Forgotten Men

            I want to start off this essay by talking about one of my go-to movie stars, Chris Pratt.  

         My first exposure to him was at the end of my freshmen summer term when he landed as Peter Quill/Star Lord in Guardians of the Galaxy, a film I very much enjoyed, as you all know. (I would also see The Lego Movie for the first time around here). And by the time he was up for Jurassic World the next summer, I was up to date with my Parks and Recreation viewing, and the world had accepted him as a household name. 

         Like a lot of celebrities who came into prominence in the wake of social media, part of Pratt’s strengths lies in his supreme accessibility. But where someone like Ryan Reynolds found his market as being this cynical son-of-a-gun, Pratt’s appeal was his complete lack of pretense. His sincerity.

    Where most movie stars end up condescending to try meeting the audience at their level, Pratt, when he’s at his best, elevates the little people. He takes you along for the ride. He gets everyone to see what it is about the average joe that makes him such a hero by putting it out there for everyone to behold and declaring that that's enough.

         The role that really got him attention was as the dopey Andy Dwyer in the NBC hit series, Parks and Recreation. His character kind of sucks during that first season, lasting six whole episodes, and he was in fact intended to be written out of the show by the end of that block. But Pratt’s inherent likeability compelled the writers to keep him around. His character did some cleanup that justified his continued presence, and he continued to be a standout among an already electric cast.

    The Andy Dwyer that everyone loves could be said to have both the temperament and the self-awareness of a golden retriever. There were recurring plotlines where his character would fantasize about being, like, a police officer or a dinosaur wrangler, which gave his transition into a proper cinematic hero a sort of poetic-ness. And by the time that show reached its conclusion, he’d already scored leading roles for both of his major franchises. Pratt went from his name appearing second-to-last on the opening credits to headlining his own movies.

Pratt’s origin as a goofball and his evolution into a more traditional action-hero, they sort of exist within the same sentence. His duality as someone who had one foot in comedy and one in the action-adventure world is an essential part of what sustains his star appeal. It’s not just that he was another handsome stallion to fill the arena. Pratt’s dual-citizen ship specifically spoke to a representation of manhood that had been deflected to the role of goofy-sidekick and was now getting to ride in the driver’s seat.

The Tomorrow War (2021)

    Through him, men whose contributions amounted to little more than weightless one-liners finally got to be in charge. They got to be listened to. Across all these epic action-adventures, we could imagine that Andy was finally living out his heroic fantasies--and if he could do it, maybe we could too. And because Pratt already had the basic frame of a star, he had a fairly clean transition into A-list herodom. Discovering that this clown could also play center ring and command the spotlight was the engine of his run through his major franchises from the mid 2010s to the 2020s.

Earlier this fall, Glen Powell attributed him to opening doors to a broader kind of action hero, “… when Pratt kind of appeared on the scene, where he was doing things that were a little more silly and buoyant, that's where I feel most at home. And that's where I feel like I had a gear that is a necessary flavor in terms of Hollywood, and not a gear that a lot of guys can play.”

    But perhaps even more essential to his star persona has been the fact that Pratt is also one of those rare Hollywood celebrities to find himself in the good graces of right-leaning Americans. Pratt has built a lot of his star persona on being a practicing Christian and in hailing from rural America. It’s not uncommon for him to post pictures of himself on the ranch or of the American flag on Memorial Day captioned with some Bible verse about praising God.

In this way, Pratt captures a sect of America that seldom feels seen among Hollywood A-listers. He’s been generally bearish on specific political declarations, but right-America has certainly claimed Pratt as their boy. And similar to what we discussed with Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, large sects of the internet automatically distrusts anything that Uncle Murph from Montana likes.

Because of things like this, left-leaning voices have assigned certain values to him, values that may or may not reflect his actual values or practices. For a lot of Tik Tokers or YouTube commenters, the sect of manhood that Pratt was shining light on became directly linked to the rise of masculinity in its most regressive form. And this is where we started to see the rising sentiment that there was just too much Pratt. Countermeasures had to be deployed.

    The center of this conversation was something about him just being allowed too many hit roles. But something like the “worst Chris” tournament of 2018, which was probably started in good jest, very quickly devolved into a rather nasty dogpiling of many baseless claims about Pratt as a person. This has echoed in some specific waves of backlash where Pratt was canceled for reportedly shaming his first wife because he … wished his current wife happy birthday, and other such dumb character attacks. This is also where we got the internet deciding that Chris Pratt is singlehandedly killing the voice acting industry by voicing Mario. (Seriously, where were you guys during Dreamworks’ entire run in the 2000s?)

Was Chris Pratt’s ubiquity so unique? I don’t know. I wasn’t around for the 80s--I’m not sure whether anyone was complaining that Harrison Ford couldn’t be Han Solo, Indiana Jones, and the guy from Blade Runner.

But in some ways, this specific kind of celebrity backlash is unique against other waves of “X celebrity is overrated and needs to go away.” A YouTube channel that I used to watch released a video about the evolution of a certain image of manhood in Hollywood. A part of this discussion touched specifically on the Chris Pratt cycle, saying something much like, “We just want the old Chris Pratt back. The loveable goofball who made us laugh. Why can’t he just stop pretending to be something he isn’t?”

This kind of phrasing sounds benevolent enough, but this underlying sentiment that Icarus has flown too close to the sun and it’s our job to fish him back down before he hurts himself, I think it reveals a kind of anxiety that sometimes emerges when a certain kind of manhood feels seen. Even though our culture sort of builds itself around patriarchy, that doesn’t mean that any given man is guaranteed either visibility or dignity. The quiet part that these kinds of outlets don’t seem to want to say out loud is that for some men, they should be grateful that they get to make us laugh for a second, and then go home. Never to be considered. Never to be the hero. “Stop taking yourself so seriously. None of us want to.”

         With that groundwork laid down, let’s talk about character actors, and especially Edward G Robinson.

“Character Actors”

Douglas Fairbanks in The Black Pirate (1926)

         The idea to sell your product on the faces of universally loved performers was around since basically the beginning of moving pictures. And even in the reported post-movie star world we may or may not be in, movie stars still manage to become focal points in the culture. But the film world is overflowing with actors–only a select few are “stars.”

Thomas Mitchell has been an essential chord in such masterworks as It’s a Wonderful Life to Gone with the Wind to Stagecoach, plus a dozen or so other essential cinema classics, but who is he next to James Stewart, Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, or John Wayne? In both versions of AFI’s Top 100 movies list, Ward Bond appears in more films than any other actor (8 films total), but try name-dropping him at the dinner table. As Ty Burr explains in Gods Like Us, “No one ever wanted to be Rains, or Ritter, or Lorre, even if they’re great fun to imitate and contemplate. We don’t project ourselves upon the great character actors, or even the hardworking ones, but they do intensify the beam we shine on the stars.” 

         And this is as true today as it was during the days of Claude Rains, Thelma Ritter, or Peter Lorre. A character like Dwayne Johnson gets mobility that Jack Black never could. (I mean, I did love Jack Black in King Kong, but as far as I know I am a lonely crowd.) And even when we do see Dwayne Johnson alongside Jack Black in something like Jumanji, the kind of attention they each command is different.

Tom Cruise in Minority Report (2002)

        This is important because the people we typically think of as “stars” are the people with whom we also form that emotional bond. There are various studies that reaffirm how celebrities occupy a similar space in our brain to real-life friends. These are people whom we imagine as being capable or deserving of revelation or excitement. Everyone else? Not so much. Actor and talk show host, James Corden, shared his experience working as a plus-sized actor,

“Certainly no-one really ever finds you attractive. You will be good friends with people who are attractive and often will be a great sense of comfort to them and perhaps chip in with the odd joke every now and again. As you get older you’ll probably be a judge in something or you’ll be dropping off a television to a handsome person in a sitcom. And that’s really how it can feel. It felt like if the world of entertainment was a big banquet table, people are like, ‘there isn’t a seat for you here’.”

My Dinner with Andre (1981)

         There are specific spaces in cinema where the complex inner-lives of average-looking actors are put front and center. But these tend to be very niche spaces, not something Cousin Richard is going to want to discuss over Thanksgiving. There are also some ways of recognizing this particular skillset. The Oscars are thoughtful enough to include supporting actor and actress categories. Even so, I think it reveals something about the way we define heroism that none of us expect Josh Gad or Steve Carrell to ever lead a superhero film.

         Today, I want to talk about how this phenomenon specifically affects men and the way we define masculinity. The Hollywood fantasy has always propped up a fantasy that deflects to men as the actants in any given story, whether they are cast specifically as heroes, adventurers, or lovers. But that fantasy only serves a specific portrait of manhood. 

Black Swan (2010)

         To be clear, we could absolutely be having lots of conversations about how this same landscape affects women. I talked, for example, about how Sarah Connor as an action heroine was unique for how she championed a certain kind of femininity that is not often seen onscreen, let alone in a starring role. There’s a lot of discussion to be had for how this kind of thing influences how women are seen and how women see themselves.

But as I argued in my piece on The Banshees of Inisherin, male issues tend to be overlooked because men don’t really know how to advocate for themselves. They are slower to stick their feet in the water and much quicker to pull them out and insist “okayi’mdone!” Ergo, these conversations require a measure of proactivity.

The Master (2012)

    Moreover, the specific consequences of neglecting this need continue to be of special interest to me. All men have a basic desire to be seen and recognized as whole individuals within their environment. And if a man’s environment does not supply him with this, he will start looking for reassurance or definition elsewhere. We are living in a hellscape where men are continually plugging into pernicious sources of definition and identity, and a lot of that has to do with the scripts we give for men to feel good in their own skin. (Imagine that: not even men are served by the demands of the patriarchy …) 

I started this whole spelunk exploring the Chris Pratt phenomenon in large part to highlight how this process works today–and also to illustrate that even after a man crosses over to success, it's not at all guaranteed that his continued presence there will go unchallenged–but the issue obviously goes back a lot further, which brings us to the man of the hour.

Edward G Robinson

         Edward G Robinson was one of those mainstays of classic Hollywood who never really got the spotlight and is still not really a household name today. People are probably most likely to recognize him as Dathan, the slaveowner from The Ten Commandments. Robinson was almost always in the background, and he would not receive any competitive Oscar wins or nominations, though after his passing, he would receive an honorary Oscar in 1973. 

         Robinson was one of those lucky actors whose career actually flourished instead of crashing after the introduction of sound pictures. His big breakthrough performance was actually a starring role in 1931’s Little Caesar, in which he played a hungry gangster out to conquer the big city. Robinson spends most of the film facing off against men who are taller or have a deeper voice than him, but the energy he commands is so rich that he always feels like a match for whatever gangster or police officer confronts him. Nick Rogers wrote in Midwest Journal this last year, “Robinson’s turn as Rico remains a lightning rod of overt menace, quietly lethal expressions and stealthily sympathetic moments.”

        In the decades following, most of his famous turns had him in villainous roles, as in something like Key Largo, where he plays opposite Humphrey Bogart, or else in some supporting position, as in something like Double Indemnity, where he plays the dispassionate observer to Fred MacMurray’s twisted love entanglement. And given the expectations for stardom, it’s easy to see why he did not attract the same attention as someone like Burt Lancaster.

    Robinson had neither the face nor the build of someone we’d consider a movie star. He did not represent what anyone would call the height of society. And that’s the hitch of being a background player. All the charisma in the world can’t help you if your jawline just won’t angularize. Robinson was a prolific actor, but with few exceptions, he typically left his mark from afar, tilling the earth for the Humphrey Bogarts and the Fred MacMurrays. 

Today, I’d like to talk for a moment about two such exceptions: John Ford’s 1935 film, The Whole Town’s Talking, and Fritz Lang’s 1945 film, Scarlet Street, both movies in which he was the starring actor. I am choosing to spotlight these two films not only because they represent two of those rare occasions where this background player actually got to step into the center ring, but they also actively explore the thresholds for how we define successful masculinity and the barriers that fence off men from attaining this.

         And like their central star, these films are both tremendously underappreciated. Neither of them are on AFI’s top 100 anything, neither of them received any Oscar attention. Both are helmed by major filmmakers of the classic age, but these are not the first movies you think about when you hear their names. Which is ridiculous because they are both excellent movies.

The characters Robinson plays in either film, they both occupy very similar positions and they want very similar things. Both require Robinson to play a polite and unassuming gentleman, and they also require him to tap into the darkest, most sadistic representations of manhood–and draw the link between the two. And though the two films occupy very different genres and have very different endings, they ultimately emerge out of the same observations: not all men are granted the same opportunities for greatness by the society they serve, but what a man does with that knowledge can mean all the difference between total ruin and the very heroism they crave.

 

Scarlet Street

         Scarlet Street is a 1940s noir film about a married banker and amateur painter, Christopher Cross, who falls in with a beguiling actress, Katherine “Kitty” March after rescuing her from what he thinks is a street mugging. Chris does not realize that Kitty’s assailant was her boyfriend, Johnny, and so he imagines that she is genuinely in love with him. Unbeknownst to Chris, Kitty and her boyfriend are plotting to steal his fortune. Of course, he does not actually possess any such money, so he supports her by embezzling from his boss.

This leads to a series of cascading criminal offenses as he makes greater leaps to be with Kitty. All the while, Kitty manipulates him into selling his art under her name after his work attracts attention. Chris is obviously playing with volatile material, but he’s determined to thread the needle, believing he can maintain the charade. And for a while, he can.

        But Chris’ embezzlement is discovered. His boss declines pressing charges owing to their good relationship, but he is let go without any hope of finding work at any other banking establishment. And when he discovers that Kitty has actually been playing him the whole time, he stabs her to death with an ice pick, escaping just before Johnny barges into the room.

         Chris never has to answer for Kitty’s murder, Johnny ends up taking the fall and receiving the death penalty. But he is tormented by her memory, and he spends his days wandering the streets with no money, no home, and no ability to create the art he loved so much. And he ends the film disgraced and homeless.

              This movie is first and foremost a masterclass in writing. The film’s final outcome is so dependent on such a hyper-specific chain of events, and yet the film’s math is airtight. Everything is cause-and-effect, and worst of all, completely recognizable within the framework of human behavior. Even though this film came out second, I wanted to start by analyzing this one first because this sort of represents the baseline problem that both films are examining.

         This is about an average joe, a man who has been completely denied attention or consideration by his environment, who falls for the fantasy of being seen and loved by a beautiful woman, and it’s also about how the pursuit of this fantasy unlocks a real monster in him, and that monster winds up bringing about his downfall. Thus, it reveals something about the latent evil that exists even within someone who might appear harmless, even unremarkable.

          A lot of this story aligns with what we know about male violence today. There is no external indicator that a man is predisposed for violent action. And this is the beautiful symmetry of the situation. Absolutely no one would have suspected that Chris would pull off something like this. And yet, this all emerged out of the behavior of one man who never would have stood out at a party.

         Chris has a measure of acceptance among his colleagues, but they view him as more of an office mascot than a giant among men or even an equal. His treatment at home, meanwhile, is simply deplorable. His awful, awful wife takes delight in holding over his head the possibility of tossing out his pictures. His marriage to Adele is purely a financial arrangement, and she degrades him and his artistic ambitions mercilessly.

         The kind of story that begins with a person admitting that they got married because they were lonely, you sort of expect it to be met with some kind of companionship by the end—often a romance, though they may achieve it in other ways. Chris does not get that. To say that Kitty has stolen his money or his career is a severe understatement. She has robbed him of his words, his spirit.

    I want to be clear that I am not condoning or excusing his behavior or trying to mischaracterize him as some sort of misunderstood idealist. I think we end up seeing exactly who he is when he puts the icepick in Kitty. He felt entitled to certain rewards based on certain behavior. And rather than just being shocked or hurt by Kitty pulling the rug out from under him, he acts out violently. Circumstances don’t unearth a profound sense of honor or principle in him, as they would in a more noble person. But I am trying to make a point about just how close many of us are to being in his situation. 

The main engine driving the noir movement of post-war Hollywood was the observation that we all contained just a little evil, and a simple alignment of circumstances was enough to bring that to the surface. And that proximity to decency is what makes the situation so agonizing. 

        Part of what affords Chris a measure of sympathy is that he is clearly a man of wasted dreams. He has been duped into believing that if he sacrificed just a little fulfillment, he would be returned with networks of security. Well, he got his security, only the toll was a little higher than he imagined. This is the situation a lot of men find themselves in as they do the thing they are told will bring them happiness and throw themselves into their work, similar to what we talked about with The Apartment.

         A part of what keeps Chris tethered to this half-life is his own timidity.  A huge plotpoint is his art flying off the shelf once it has the chance for exposure, after Kitty starts selling it behind his back. Acclaim and appreciation was in reach for Chris, if he had just shown a little more tenacity in getting his art out there for the world to see. That fire was dormant in him, but rather than ever showing its face in the marketspace, it flared as a murderous burst. In a similar way that we can’t totally write off his actions, we can’t pretend that there were no other avenues.

         Chris’ lack of masculinity is the thing that is hung over him throughout the duration of the film. The last thing Kitty does to him before he stabs her is torment him for being weaker than Johnny, physically and mentally. Chris was already suffering the consequences of his actions, of his choice to enter into a relatively sterile life in order to keep his head up. That will take on new dimensions once he’s crossed his final threshold. But because we recognize his starting point, we watch his ending feeling violated.

Thus, Scarlet Street models what happens when neglected men allow their resentment and entitlement to steer their actions, and this begs the question of whether there’s another way for them.

 

The Whole Town’s Talking 

         The Whole Town’s Talking is a screwball comedy overlaid with a crime film imperative. The film sees a polite and mild-mannered insurance company clerk, Arthur Jones, whose life is turned upside down when a violent gangster, “Mannion”—who happens to look just like him—breaks out of prison. The public keeps on calling the cops on Jones believing him to be the vicious criminal, but when the police catch onto the discrepancy, they afford Jones an identification card that allows him to move about freely without fear of harassment.

         It seems like a perfect solution, until Jones finds himself cornered in his own home by Mannion himself, who demands at gunpoint that he hand over this identification card so that he can move in the light of day. And for a period, Mannion is able to use Jones as a cover to continue his crime spree, reuniting with his fellow criminals in order to bring the city under subjugation.

         Circumstances escalate and Mannion starts taking hostages, including the office girl who is starting to take notice of Jones. When Mannion ends up killing an old compatriot, the police catch onto the fact that Mannion is somehow working around their system. And so they conspire to intercept him at a bank and gun him down.

         Mannion catches wind of the cops’ plan and arranges for Jones to take the fall, promising to let him go free if he’ll perform just one more task for him and deposit some money into the bank where he knows the police will be waiting for him. Just before Jones is about to walk into the bank, he realizes he has left the money behind and goes back to retrieve it, determined to do the job right. But when he catches onto Mannion’s deception, he is able to manipulate the playing board and trick Mannion’s thugs into taking him out instead before locking them in a room until the authorities can come in and clear the situation. Jones ends the film hailed as a hero.

               This film is ... much funnier Scarlet Street. It’s supposed to be laughable that such a timid desk jockey like Jones could ever be the face of such ruthlessness. The scene in which the police harass him down at headquarters is equal parts hilarious and tragic. Robinson plays the whole thing like a puppy who just can’t understand why he’s in timeout, which makes the police look that much dumber for grilling someone we can obviously see is the wrong guy. And for all his dutiful service, his own boss cannot pick him out of the crowd and is unable to vouch for him here.

    Like Chris, Jones is a man of untapped potential. Where Chris has a million paintings in the bathroom, Jones has a million unpublished novels in his living room. Part of Jones’ timidity is wrapped in his admiration of Miss Wilhelmina Clark, played by Jean Arthur. She plays a familiar role as the prize that awaits our hero if he can just find the gumption.

    And the film has admittedly some very slanted ideas of how to communicate that. There’s an alcohol-induced stupor in which Jones says and does all the things he might if he had a little more tenacity. This sees him kissing Jean Arthur spontaneously, which again, we can understand as being intended as admirable. Jones also has a picture of her in his room that she does not know about. We could give John Ford some notes about this. But more essential, I suppose, is Wilhelmina’s function as the person who sees the good in Jones even when it’s still all just potential energy. She sees past the arbitrary definitions of worth that are assigned to men.

         As with Chris in Scarlet Street, Jones is easy to take for granted. No one would expect him to be capable of evil because no one would expect him to be capable of anything. He is an NPC background player who is not expected to influence his own environment. The intrusion of Mannion does bring him some measure of fame. Yet even here, he is being valued as an amusement, a novelty. Nobody admires him for his contributions to his community or the goodness of his heart.

We could easily imagine that, suffering under the same neglect and desiring the same retribution, Jones might take a similar route that Chris did. But the movie explores the duality of manhood in a different way with this film. The two faces of manhood are shown not in one character undergoing a radical change, but in two radically different characters competing in one arena. If we want to get real Freudian, we can read this as Jones combating his own latent aggression and brutality—the part of him that resents being an anonymous cog in a machine.

The movie sets Jones up for a really dire ending where he takes the fall for Mannion, perhaps as some kind of retribution for him enjoying the spotlight too much. But the film extends him some much needed mercy, conditional upon him rising above his circumstances and proving his virtue even in the face of hostile circumstances. Jones gets to discover what should have been obvious to Chris, that even if the world refuses to reward him for his gentlemanly brand of manhood, these are ultimately assets, both to himself and to the system that underestimates him. Unlike Chris, he wins this fight against his darker self.

The film’s ending has the meager and polite Jones bringing about the downfall of his dark shadow by surprising everyone with his ingenuity. Jones’ quick thinking and his insistence on doing the right thing prove to be his greatest assets in bringing Mannion down when no one else could. He did not have to wait for his world to start to recognize him as the hero he was. The moment Jones saw the opportunity for true heroism, he took it as his responsibility to behave admirably.

A Hero's Welcome

Vertigo (1958)

     So much of the script that men are given for success follows a very specific trajectory, predicated on them carrying certain characteristics and promising certain outcomes. What I think sometimes goes underdiscussed is that it’s not that men should be guaranteed specific gifts for basic display of human decency. The standard template has seen the main hero getting the girl in the end, whether or not he even deserves her, and that hasn’t made things easier for anyone.

    But we can perhaps recognize that players all across the board possess depth of emotion and capacity for greatness that perhaps deserves to be displayed in the stories we tell ourselves, on and off the big screen. And again, that may or may not have anything to do with giving them the girl of their dreams. Getting the girl isn’t what filled Jones’ void, and not getting the girl isn’t what made Chris into a monster. I think it is worth it to consider what it takes for men of all makes to feel secure in their place in the story.

    The Edward G Robinsons of the field just need attention. Consideration. They deserve opportunities to be seen, and not just as reflecting glasses for those we might consider “real stars.” We’ve learned time and time again that when men feel undefined by their society, they will seek definition from other sources.

Megamind (2010)

   And yes, finding that security in something substantive and worthwhile is a thing that men largely have to do for themselves, but we can certainly make the terrain a little easier for such a change to happen. We can start expecting to see a wider range of masculinity represented in our shared stories. We can be proactive offscreen in how we look for and recognize admirable qualities in the people in our environment, whether or not they fit a predetermined template of greatness.

  Edward G Robinson said sometime late in his career, "If I were just a bit taller and I was a little more handsome or something like that, I could have played all the roles that I have played, and played many more. There is such a thing as a handicap, but you've got to be that much better as an actor. It kept me from certain roles that I might have had, but then, it kept others from playing my roles, so I don't know that it's not altogether balanced."

              As for Chris Pratt, so long as he continues to bring his natural authenticity to set each day, and so long as he continues to be a good boy, I hope he gets to keep bringing his energy to the big screen in whatever way feels right for him. And while they’re waiting for the world to catch up, the Edward G Robinsons can learn to take some comfort in acknowledging the variety of ways in which admirable masculinity can manifest, and we need them all.

        --The Professor