Diminutive, elfin supporting player – and scene-stealer – who ricocheted between television work and film roles. Remembered most fondly as a hapless hoodlum, often in the shadow of iconic screen tough guys – Bogart, Hayden, Tierney. Recurring roles in underworld thrillers as repressed criminal cronies, sadists’ sidekicks, losers in thrall to a femme fatale; he rarely survived until the final credits.
Son
of an ex-vaudeville performer and a former stage actress, he was drawn to the
stage during his adolescence. Honed his acting skills in the Twenties in
touring companies and on Broadway. Debuted on the silver screen in the 1930
version of the play Her Unborn Child,
relocating permanently to California in 1936. Played disparate roles –
left-wing radical, shop clerks, students – until he first drifted through the
clammy milieu of noir in Stranger on the
Third Floor.
Stamped his mark on the genre as Wilmer Cook, the neurotic henchman in The Maltese Falcon. Afforded the opportunity to jest in a few screwball comedies but, after war service, was embraced by the architects of grim, shadowy thrillers.
Stamped his mark on the genre as Wilmer Cook, the neurotic henchman in The Maltese Falcon. Afforded the opportunity to jest in a few screwball comedies but, after war service, was embraced by the architects of grim, shadowy thrillers.
His
characters were often weak and craven, delusional or unstable – an obsessive
switchboard operator in I Wake Up
Screaming, a leering jazz drummer in one of noir’s sexiest vignettes in Phantom Lady, a hoodlum in Dillinger, informant in The Big Sleep. His skittish energy as the
spineless George Peatty practically steals the heist masterpiece The Killing.
He
was in few big-screen westerns in the Fifties, but the genre provided Cook one
of his most powerful screen exits after drawing on Jack Palance in Shane.
His
varied facial expressions and bug-eyed stare helped secure roles in horror
films – House on Haunted Hill, The Haunted Palace, Rosemary’s Baby. From the Sixties, grizzled with age, he blended
into the mournful atmosphere of elegiac westerns – One Eyed Jacks, Welcome to
Hard Times, Pat Garrett and Billy the
Kid, Tom Horn.
Lived
a fairly isolated life, spending much of his leisure time fishing for trout in
the High Sierra. According to John Huston, “When he was wanted in 
Shot,
poisoned, sold out and stabbed on screen, Cook – purveyor of small-time losers
with heavyweight dreams – had outlived all of his Falcon co-stars.
Five standout roles
As
Wilmer Cook, ‘the gunsel’ (a sexually pejorative term from Hammett’s novel that
slipped past the Warner Bros. censors) in The
Maltese Falcon, his indignant reaction at being humiliated by Bogart’s wily
gumshoe is a blueprint for the bearing of his subsequent noir characters; “If
you look at the scene closely, the tears are streaming down my face I’m so
angry,” he said.
Conniving
and predatory as Cleeve in the bayou thriller Dark Waters, Cook displays a more disquieting aspect than usual.
The scene in which he nefariously attempts to coax war-traumatised Merle Oberon
into an isolated boat trip is uncomfortable to say the least.
As
Marty in Born to Kill, he is faithful
to Lawrence Tierney despite knowing he is a psychopath. His misguided loyalty
backfires when he realises even years of companionship are no deterrent against
his friend’s rage.
As
cuckolded George Peatty, inside man on a racecourse heist in The Killing, he is hopelessly under wife
Marie Windsor’s sensuous spell, and as a consequence easily manipulated. An
ironic plot twist affords the little guy the chance to avenge his betrayal.
As
impetuous sodbuster Stonewall Torrey in Shane,
his sense of injustice and foolhardy courage cost him his life. His squalid death,
the vestiges of heroism sprawled in the mud, changed the depiction of violence
in the genre for ever.
Clark Hodgkiss
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