Denver Pyle spent half a century playing the old man at the edge of the frame: the gruff father, the mountain hermit, the lawman nobody takes seriously. He was good at it, and the parts rarely asked him for anything more.
Fi1m perspective
Watch what Bonnie and Clyde (1967) does with Frank Hamer. The Texas Ranger who ought to be the threat is caught by the gang, posed for a photograph and laughed at, and Denver Pyle has to stand there and take it. Arthur Penn's film has no interest in the people its outlaws rob and humiliate, and Hamer is the only one of them who even gets a name. We laughed along with everyone else when the camera clicked, then felt a little mean about it, because his is the one face in the shot that is not enjoying itself. It is the film he is most remembered for, and it uses him as a prop.
That was the shape of the career. He left Colorado State without finishing, drummed, worked the oil fields, and came to acting through amateur theatre in the mid-1940s, with a first film in The Guilt of Janet Ames (1947). Through the 1950s he was the uncredited face in the Western and a regular caller on Gunsmoke and Bonanza. He stood near John Wayne in five films, The Alamo (1960) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) among them, and John Ford directed him twice. None of it made him a star. It made him recognisable, which for a character actor is the longer contract.
Television found a use for him that films never quite did. On The Andy Griffith Show (from 1963) he was Briscoe Darling, the hill patriarch, with the Dillards supplying the music; on The Doris Day Show he was Buck Webb. Then Mad Jack in The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams (1977–78) and, for 146 episodes, Uncle Jesse Duke in The Dukes of Hazzard (1979–85), the moral centre of the Duke family. He knew exactly what he was selling. "I was 30, playing guys 60 years old," he said in 1981, and by the time he was 60 the age and the type had finally met.
The limits are plain. The slow drawl and the lanky frame got him hired, and the hiring was for the same three men over and over, which is the only reservation anyone has raised about him and a fair one, though it says more about the people casting than the man cast. Most writing on him points to Hamer as his one intense film part, and we understand the reach, since it is the only film role anyone remembers. But on the screen the film is laughing at him rather than with him, and that is not the same as giving him a scene.
If you want him, go to the television, where somebody at last gave him the chair at the head of the table and let him sit in it. In the films he is standing at the back, and he is usually the one you believe.
Biography
Denver Pyle was an American film and television actor. He played Frank Hamer in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde.
Pyle was known for portraying Briscoe Darling in several episodes of The Andy Griffith Show and Jesse Duke in The Dukes of Hazzard from 1979 to 1985. Other credits include The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), The Alamo (1960) and The Great Race (1965). He also appeared in episodes of Bonanza and Murder, She Wrote.
Born Denver Dell Pyle in Bethune, Colorado, on 11 May 1920, he died on 25 December 1997.
