Dick Miller

In Gremlins (1984), Dick Miller's Murray Futterman is the paranoid neighbour, a useful man to have around when a film means to make ordinary life unpleasant. Miller's familiar working-class manner fits Joe Dante's nasty Christmas comedy without making him seem a visitor recruited for a joke. We like the sense that Futterman has complaints which would exist even without the creatures. There is a limit, though: the humans can be underwritten, and an actor this recognisable can be asked to do the writer's work for him.

Miller's screen career began in Roger Corman productions in the mid-1950s, with Apache Woman (1955) his first credited role. A Bucket of Blood (1959) gave him an early starring part as Walter Paisley, a name later reused as an in-joke in other films. In small parts, that Bronx accent and the air of a working man being put upon were enough to establish him quickly. By the late 1970s he was working regularly with Dante, whose The Howling (1981) cast him as an occult bookshop owner, again called Walter Paisley.

In James Cameron's The Terminator (1984), he is the pawnshop clerk supplying weapons to the cyborg, a brief encounter in a film that rarely pauses. We smiled at the transaction because Miller's everyday manner makes this alarming customer seem, for a moment, like routine business. Cameron's pursuit thriller is frightening and fast, and Miller fits its pace by making the clerk legible without needing a separate story. He gives us enough to recognise the sort of man behind the counter, then lets the film get on with it.

His appeal depends partly on repetition: the accent, the put-upon working man, the pleasure of a face we already know. The risk is that recognition becomes the whole attraction, and we stop asking how much the part actually gives him to play. Dante gives him enough in Gremlins to make Futterman worth watching, even if the creatures remain the main reason to see it. Start there, then try A Bucket of Blood for the less common sight of Miller in a starring role.