As the actors who became personal touchstones during my youth continue to depart this mortal coil due to the inevitability of time, I usually attempt to place their passings into a philosophical perspective (unless I knew them personally) despite the pangs of inner pain and regret.
Sometimes the departure of a familiar face affects me more than others. A case-in-point was the death of veteran character actor, Dabbs Greer last evening. Dabbs was 90 years old and had been an working actor for seven decades.
Greer was everywhere on television when I grew up: The Adventures of Superman, The Rifleman, The Andy Griffith Show, Perry Mason, The Twilight Zone, etc. He appeared in nearly 600 television programs and over 100 films. Greer was an actor’s actor who was equally at home on a horse, a rocket ship, pumping gas or behind a grocery counter. There was always an earnest believability in his work that Dabbs brought to the screen from his native Missouri after he arrived in Hollywood in the late 1930’s.
Growing up and watching horror and science-fiction movies on network television in the New York area, Dabbs Greer’s authenticity became ingrained on my consciousness during repetitive viewings of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) – he was the gas station attendant who surreptitiously places a seedpod in the trunk of Kevin McCarthy’s car – , The Vampire (1957), It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) and a sizeable role as Frank Lovejoy’s policeman partner in House of Wax (1952).
As I acquired my confirmed taste in film noir, I continued to bump into Greer. Reign of Terror (1949) he played a French bridge guard in his first speaking part, The Damned Don’t Cry (1950) – the reporter who has the last lines in the movie, The Unknown Man (1951), Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954) – a principal instigator, Private Hell 36, (1954) and the San Quentin gas chamber custodian in I Want to Live (1958) who has a memorable exchange with the doomed Susan Hayward. I believe that Greer can be spotted as one of the reporters on Norma Desmond’s staircase as she ascends for her final closeup in Sunset Boulevard (1950).
Dabbs Greer resided in Pasadena since 1943 and was a mainstay at the famed Pasadena Playhouse for many years while continuing to work in television – a decade as a regular on Little House on the Prairie – and films until the infirmities of age finally retired him about four years ago. His big screen finale proved to be a memorable valedictorian in The Green Mile (1999) as the older “Paul Edgecombe” – the aged version of Tom Hanks’ character. Always accessible, gracious and possessed of an comprehensive memory (a meticulous man, he also kept careful track of every acting job from day one in a series of notebooks), Greer made himself available to a new generation of fans, writers and cinephiles who would seek him out to chat on the telephone.
The quotation on the post title are Dabbs Greer’s own words that he provided to a reporter some years ago when queried about his enduring skills as an actor. No truer epitaph exists for the thinning legion of veteran Hollywood character players. “Dabbsie” was one of the best. R.I.P.
