Arthur O'Connell had been acting since 1929 when Picnic (1955) made him the screen's rumpled, kindly, faintly disappointed man next door, and the pictures kept him there. He was good at it, and they rarely asked him for anything else.
Fi1m perspective
Arthur O'Connell is the man at the edge of the frame who has already had a drink and is wondering about another. He played amiable, flawed men of middle age and beyond: fathers, friends, the neighbour who means well, the suitor who has waited too long to ask. He could be funny and sad in the same line without leaning on either, and he never looked as though he expected the film to be about him. Mostly it was not.
It took a long time to get even that far. He began in summer stock and vaudeville in 1929, and by the late 1930s was taking small uncredited film parts, among them a reporter in Citizen Kane (1941), which came out of his stage work with Orson Welles. The war interrupted, and afterwards nothing much happened until he originated Howard Bevans on Broadway in Picnic in 1953 and carried the part into Joshua Logan's 1955 film. He was forty-seven. Logan used him again in Bus Stop (1956), Anthony Mann put him in Man of the West (1958) and Cimarron (1960), and in Anatomy of a Murder (1959) he was the drinking lawyer who steadies James Stewart. After that came the steady trade: Operation Petticoat (1959), Follow That Dream (1962), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), a final film in The Hiding Place (1975), and a great deal of television.
Picnic is the one to click through to. We thought Logan blew Inge's small play up too wide and let much of it go soft, and what survived was Holden, Rosalind Russell and one slow dance on a lit pier. O'Connell's Howard is the timid suitor in the corner of all that, and we were fonder of him than the film seemed to expect us to be, because he is the only person in it who wants something modest and is embarrassed to want it. That is his register: the small hope, held quietly, in a room full of larger ones. Anatomy of a Murder gives it a job to do, as the mentor who knows more than he can be trusted to remember by evening.
The cost was the obvious one. Having found his type, the studios cast it again and again, and the late 1950s and 1960s are full of O'Connell losers and O'Connell drunks, most of them decent, few of them different from one another. In Cimarron he is one of a crowd; our review found more to say about the horses. He was a good ensemble actor and a reliable screen father for the teen-idol pictures, and that is honourable work, but it is not the same as being asked to surprise anyone.
Start with Picnic and Anatomy of a Murder, and watch what he does when the camera is on somebody else.
Biography
Arthur O'Connell (29 March 1908 – 18 May 1981) was an American stage and film actor. Born in New York City, he began his career in vaudeville and made his legitimate stage debut in the late 1920s. He appeared in small film roles from the late 1930s, including an uncredited part as a reporter in Citizen Kane (1941).
O'Connell achieved recognition on Broadway in the 1953 production of Picnic, a role he reprised in the 1955 film adaptation, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He received a second nomination for his performance as a boozy lawyer in Anatomy of a Murder (1959). His other notable film credits include Bus Stop (1956), Man of the West (1958), Operation Petticoat (1959), Cimarron (1960) as Tom Wyatt, The Great Race (1965), Fantastic Voyage (1966) and The Poseidon Adventure (1972). He also made numerous television guest appearances.
