JOHN DAVIS CHANDLER

(1935-2010, Hinton, West Virginia)

Slim, weaselly, nasal-voiced character actor, a malevolent presence in crime films and westerns throughout the Sixties and early Seventies. His sneering face did sterling service as rednecks, psychos, bushwhackers, yellow-bellies and other bad eggs.

 

Friends from Charleston remembered him very differently: “Scholarly and athletic, a blue-eye blond with an easy smile and an upbeat personality.” A tennis prodigy in his teens, he studied medicine – his father’s line – at Princeton before dropping out to joining the army. Eventually he found his métier on the New York stage.

 

 

First screen roles set the pattern for his career: switchblade-slinging street punk in John Frankenheimer’s The Young Savages, a ‘problem picture’ typical of the era; gangland loose cannon ‘Mad Dog’ Coll – Chandler’s only lead – in an eponymous 1961 biopic, part of a cycle of retro mob movies that included The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, Portrait of a Mobster, Al Capone and the same director's Murder, Inc. The real Coll was an enforcer for the Dutch Schultz mob who became notorious while still in his teens. Chandler played him like an extreme version of the maladjusted delinquents who’d run riot in Hollywood for a decade – a rebel whose only cause seemed to be inflicting pain and suffering. (Unlike Chandler, two other newcomers in the cast, Telly Savalas and Gene Hackman, went on to become household names.)

 

 

A close friend of Warren Oates, he was part of Sam Peckinpah’s social set. The director cast him as one of the verminous Hammond brothers in Ride the High Country; as bigoted peckerwood Jimmy Lee Benteen in Major Dundee; and in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid as the slimy investor Norris, who knows what he can do with his $500. 
 

Like many character actors of his generation, he found succour on the small screen once film roles dried up. Towards the end of his life he became something of a recluse, preferring yoga, it seems, to the public eye.

 

 

Five standout roles

As gangster Vincent ‘Mad Dog’ Coll, he attacks the part with neophyte zeal (The New York Times described him as “shrill and obvious”). Nevertheless, the maniacal eagerness fits the character – a young man desperate to make his mark in a cut-throat milieu, much like Chandler was “blasting his way to stardom”, per the publicity. 

As Jimmy Hammond in Ride the High Country, “the baby of the family”, he is the first to cast lustful glances on big brother Billy’s intended, the misguided Elsa Knudsen.

As Jimmy Lee Benteen in Major Dundee, he almost provokes a race war between his fellow Rebs and Dundee’s black volunteers, goading Brock Peters with plantation-house patter until put in his place by RG Armstrong’s formidable preacher.

As Fair, one of Warren Oates’ lieutenants in Barquero, his swagger collapses upon capture by Forrest Tucker’s ant-slurping mountain man – Chandler’s expressions of fear and disgust are priceless as he becomes effectively the older man’s pet.

As a bounty hunter who squares up to The Outlaw Josey Wales, he does little more than walk on and get shot. Nonetheless it is a noteworthy scene, and Chandler is the recipient of one of Clint Eastwood’s pithiest observations: “Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’, boy.”
Kevin Grant